“Why?”
“I think just to mess with me,” he said, shrugging.
“Hey,” I said, pointing toward the woods, “I noticed a tree out there with a red X on it. What does that mean?”
He held my gaze, and for an instant, I thought he was going to challenge me. By mentioning the tree, I’d just given myself away. I could tell from the look in his eye that there were no suchtrees visible from the trails. But if he knew this, he didn’t press the matter.
“Root rot,” he said. “It’s tagged for removal.”
“Ah. I see,” I said, shoving my hands into my pockets. “Well, I’ll leave you to it. I’m gonna head back.”
He tilted his head. “I’ll walk you back. Give me a minute.”
I didn’t agree to an escort, but as I watched him jog back to drop off his gear, I found that I wasn’t moving, either. He returned, and together we started toward the main part of campus.
“Do apiaries always look like that, like little houses?”
“No,” he said with a sheepish grin. “That’s all me. I thought it would be cute. They remind me of the colored houses on the shores of Greenland.”
“Are you an entomologist? I thought you said you did something with systems.”
“Yeah, I do systems science. The bees are just my hobby. My one true love, if you will.”
“I’m embarrassed to say I don’t really know much about systems science.”
“It’s basically the study of the relationship between structure and behavior,” he said as we walked back along the lantern-lined path through the switch grass. “If we can understand that relationship, we can understand why a system might function poorly or well, and if we can identify a place of weakness, we can step in and intervene to improve it. Like, for instance, do you know what a feedback loop is?”
“Like homeostasis?”
“That’s a great example. It’s the mechanism that allows us to change the relationship between, say, the inflow and outflow of a system. In the case of homeostasis, if a biological process inthe body gets out of whack, we have feedback loops that help us return to normal.”
We shifted onto a trail I hadn’t been on yet, a slightly overgrown one, but I could tell we were getting close to campus.
“A major mistake humans make,” he continued, pushing aside a branch, “is that when we deal with a complex system, we tend to take out balancing feedback loops that only really kick into gear in emergency situations. These feedback loops might be expensive or difficult to maintain, so the tendency is to think that because they are rarely used, they aren’t important. But this couldn’t be further from the truth. Sometimes these feedback loops are so key to the functioning of the system that if you remove them, and something goes wrong that should trigger the loops to kick into gear and they’re not there, the entire system will collapse. It’s like a fire extinguisher. It might be annoying to keep. It’s unwieldy, it takes up space, and we almost never use it. But when we do need it… we really need it. In my opinion, people don’t think enough about complex systems. We like to think things are simple, but for the most part, they aren’t. Yes and no, black and white, these tend to be oversimplifications, because in reality, everything is bound up with and affects a plethora of other things.”
“This sounds more like philosophy than science.”
“In some ways the two fields are related, but then often the way we make distinctions between fields of study can feel arbitrary. Even in the biological sciences the way we categorize things is essentially just an agreed-upon taxonomy. Take entomology, for instance. There are many insects that we have yet to fully understand, and we will put them into one category, only to decide later that they fit better into another. But itdoesn’t make that earlier categorization untrue exactly. It’s just a reflection of the way our understanding of the natural world evolves.”
“Do you have a specialty within your field?”
He nodded. “Game theory, mathematical models, that kind of thing.”
As we neared campus, we diverged onto an arterial path—a shorter one that led us back toward the lake. As we passed an ornate wrought-iron bench flanked by juvenile orange trees, I stopped suddenly.
“I’ve seen this before,” I said.
“It’s in some of the promotional materials.”
“No… it’s the strangest feeling. Déjà vu, I guess.”
We continued down a stone path and through a garden alive with the fluttering of gossamer-winged insects. Suddenly the path opened directly onto the shore of that magnificently cornflower-blue lake. The lake almost seemed to glow. The surface appeared incredibly still, and yet it lapped gently against the shore. In that moment, I thought the sound of lake water breaking against smooth stone must be the most beautiful sound in the world. I walked closer to the water, breathing in its clean, crisp scent. Staring out at the island, I felt oddly at peace, almost sedated.
“There’s a scientific explanation for déjà vu, you know,” he said.
“I think I read something about that. Something with neurotransmitters and synapses.”
He winced. “Yeah, kind of. But you could say that about almost anything even remotely related to the process of perception.”
