Where do big scientists come from? From little scientists: as every botanist knows, from tiny acorns do mighty oak trees grow.
Dr. Harold Leslie Atwood was once simply the small boy Harold. He was older than me by almost three years, so my universe has always contained him, and I thus had ample opportunity to observe his scientific interests unfolding.
Our father, Dr. Carl Atwood, was a field entomologist during Harold’s formative years – in the late 1930s and the early to middle 1940s – so collecting bottles, test tubes, and insects on pins were no strangers to Harold.
Our mother, Margaret Killam Atwood, was luckily an outdoors enthusiast and did not balk at taking a young baby into the wilderness. In those days, the family spent the spring, summer, and fall in the Quebec north woods, on the shore of a lake in Abitibi. They lived in tents when Harold was a baby; he was kept in a wooden cheese box with mosquito netting tacked over it. Transportation was by canoe, rowboat, or wartime outboard motor, as there was no road; cooking was by the campfire; water was from the lake.
Figure 1. Harold with Margaret and their younger sister Ruth.
By the time I arrived, our parents had built a board-and-batten house, heated by a wood stove, with another wood cookstove in the kitchen. Harold was already an ardent collector of garter snakes, which he would take to bed with him. During the nights, the snakes would make their way into the still-warm ashes of the kitchen stove, so in the mornings my mother would greet the day by releasing the ash-covered snakes back into the wild. She, finally, pointed out to Harold that snakes were happier outside, which was probably true.
Child Harold was singularly focused and very goal-oriented. It was a mistake to give him a colouring book, said our mother: he would colour and colour until it was all done, even though his fingers bled. A scientist visitor came upon him sawing away with his little saw – he must have been about four – and said to him, “What are you making, my little man?”
“Sawdust,” replied Harold. It should have been obvious: you have a saw, you make sawdust. End of story.
Harold collected other things besides snakes. He was an expert crayfish hunter, moving underwater rocks and grabbing the crayfish as they scooted backwards. On land, he was a patient and methodical overturner of logs: what might be found there? Usually, only beetles, ants, and worms, but if he was lucky there might be a salamander; if not, there was always another log. Such is the spirit of scientific investigation.
Figure 2. Harold holding a snake.
Young Harold was also an author. He wrote a great many books, all of them on lined paper folded in two, with a construction-paper cover sewed on with wool or thread. He began with space adventure books featuring a trio of super-rabbits who lived on a distant planet. Their mother was a widow, but quite well-off; she kept a revolver under her bed in case of robbers, and was intrepid, like our own mother.
Quite soon, however, the rabbit triplets were involved in a long drawn-out series of space wars against their enemies, the foxes, illustrated with many explosions, with fire and a great deal of smoke; not unsurprising, as these were the war years and war was much on our child minds.
Figure 3. a and b. Harold’s notebooks.
Then, a strange thing happened: young Harold stopped writing about wars on other planets and started writing about the other planets themselves: their flora, their fauna, their hominids, their mushrooms, and their diseases. Each was illustrated, sometimes with labels pointing to the various features. Here, for instance, is the Araga: “Lives on rocks. Eats flesh. A scavenger. Is capable of long jumps. Very good to eat. Its nose is a sucker. Has nose on end of tail.”
That was one of the less fearsome beasts. The Tyranyte, on the other hand, was the size of a dinosaur (we were very smitten with dinosaurs, as I recall) and had two pairs of tusks, while the Anangor had poison fangs and the Entelan had “four tusks and eyes, lies in wait for its prey, and paralyzes it with sting.” It also had hypnotic powers.
Evidently, the forces of evolution had raged unchecked on these other planets; but then, they had on ours. We had a microscope and could see what was going on in pond water. It was not a soothing sight.
One of young Harold’s books was called “Animals of Neptune,” and at the front of it he has an Author’s Note that serves as a model of its kind: “Introduction. This story is not true. Of course, there is a planet called Neptune, but its inhabitation is unknown. I have made up a number of things that will be used in the next two volumes. Harold L. Atwood, author of “Alfred’s Youth,” etc. etc. Read on.” Would that all authors would be so forthright.
The reader, in this case, was me because I read all of Harold’s books, and I did read on. Animals of Neptune is gripping. Every single one of the animals described is poisonous, barbed, ferocious, and deadly in the extreme. Do not go for a walk on Neptune, was the message. You will never come back.
The next stage in Harold’s scientific evolution was actual experimentation. By that time, we were spending the spring, summer, and fall at a new location on the north shore of Lake Superior, as Carl Atwood was setting up the insect lab in Sault Ste. Marie, and in the open oak woods Harold set up his own lab. It was devoted to the study of mould, and I was allowed to be a sort of peripheral lab assistant. A number of glass jars with screw tops was obtained, and into these, we sealed various foodstuffs filched from our dinners: pieces of bread, pieces of cheese, pieces of meat, and selected items of produce. Every few days, we would check the progress of our experiment: many, varied, and beauteous were the moulds thus produced. The result? Science had spoken, and the evidence was clear: you can grow mould on just about darn near everything, except for instance rusty nails. You can’t grow mould on them.
It was a mere hop, step and jump – a hop, step and jump that took, granted, a number of years and a lot of hard work – from the mould laboratory to Harold’s scientific career. (I will skip the episode with the Astound-Your-Friends chemistry set in approximately 1949, during which, we stank out our mother’s bridge club – though not exactly on purpose – by making hydrogen sulfide. I believe those kinds of chemistry sets are forbidden now.)
Once fully launched into science, Harold was as single-minded and focused as he had been when wrecking his fingers on colouring books and reducing pieces of wood to sawdust. One of his first experiments as a science student involved mosquitoes, which were kept in a cage and had to be fed on blood. Whose blood? Harold’s blood. He would stick in his arm, wait patiently until the mosquitoes were full; then, carefully withdraw the arm. Now that’s dedication.
Editors' Note
Margaret Atwood is the author of many novels, non-fiction books and poetry collections that have won numerous awards, including The Handmaid's Tale (1985), and Oryx and Crake (2003), and MaddAddam (2013). Additional autobiographical inspirations of Harold Atwood's formative years may be found in her earlier novel Cat's Eye (1988).