But what does it mean

I was sitting on the wax-paper table at Dr. Julian's office because my shin wasn't broken.

They told me that an x-ray had shown a seven-inch vertical fracture down my shin and that if they caught me not using crutches within the next three months I would be promptly removed from the team and my scholarship taken away.  But three days later my shin didn't hurt and I wanted to walk again.We know, they said, that you just want to go to California for the meet. This is not your time. Maybe it's never your time. Maybe this isn't for you. How often do you get hurt and we come telling you that you need to take time off, and you don't do it.

How many times do I heal faster on my own than your ridiculous nonsense, I wanted to ask. I have always been too prideful for my own good. Always. I've also always been a tremendous pushover. But instead I said, okay, I'm headed to the elliptical machine.  They said, see you in three hours. The sign on the wall said, be polite to others, do not sweat. Dr. Julian came into the office to tell me what I knew all along-- my shin was not broken.  I had another problem that was causing microtears in my muscles that he could see on the MRI-- a condition called hypotonia, common in people with defunct mental states-- it meant that my body couldn't communicate dualing signals with my muscles.  When it told one muscle to relax, it automatically told another one to tense. He pulled some strings for me and got me into therapy for free. I have not had any serious sports "injuries" since. The university was very hush-0hush about the whole thing. There was talk of a scheme underlying, as I was certainly not a great team member, and it took me a long time to become brainwashed to the mindset of making sacrifices for the team hierarchical hold. Eventually they cracked my brain, but my shin was nonetheless intact.

It was at that time that I said to myself, sitting on the table, and talking to Dr. Julian, that I said to myself, I need to be an orthopaedist. After all, I had been "saved" by one.  I had paper and images to prove that I in fact had a problem that was not a broken shin. This must be the most rewarding work, "saving" athletes so that they can pursue their passions. Dr. Julian was for a while my hero.

I typed before and I should reiterate here that I have always wanted to be a "hero." I realized the implications of this sentence about two days after I wrote it. I am by training a symbolist. Language is fascinating in that it takes so much breadth of idea and theme and compresses it into a single word. Hero. Love. Life. When we use that term through a standard  syntactical construction we bridge together word and idea and inherently create a set of analytical tools to use for it. We are very metonymical.  I say hero, and suddenly things that I never first imagined: superman, Einstein, ancient Greek lore, these are all part of the sentence. What is a hero? A standard protagonist of sorts, having epic adventures filled with meaningful failures and a barely make it climax and then a life is great and easy conclusion? Or some kind of lone spectre summiting mountains and passing distant judgement on the world, to cunning and smart for her own good? Maybe a hero is some Jane Austen woman who manages to convince both herself and Mr. Darcy to change? Tools we use to assess these protagonists are now fair game for assessing ourselves: is it a question of what Lucy DID to save Narnia or who she was? Or both? How are heroes made and analyzed?

I tile this "But what does it mean" because the question of venerating a Narnian warrior girl has something to do with how I view a job or career prospect. But what does it mean to be a hero in career fields? At the risk of being myopic, I even say, what does it mean to be a hero in the sciences? I don't know the answer to this question. Is it great achievement, like winning the Nobel Prize? Would that make me a scientific hero? Or is it better to be less prolific but more productive, maybe doing something small that changes the way that people look at a certain problem. Who invented the ANOVA? How many statisticians use ANOVA every day? Try to name all the Nobel Prize winners-- these are the top folks in science, the number ones, the "heros"-- I can't do it.  I can't even get five. And realistically, the honor of being even in contention for the prize would be pretty big. How many Nobel finalists can I name? None. Not a single one. These are the top dogs-- they should be the heros.  So it makes me wonder. Dimensional analysis shows that my goal and my progress are using two different units. Conversion is needed for understanding results.

I I have to give a presentation in December to a field that is entirely not mine. I will be batting in the big leagues when all I have ever encountered was a bowling ball.  Spheres carry different weights, to say the least. So it is safe to say that none will ask me questions about trees or something I know and am prepared for-- nor am I scared to say "well, I don't know" to questions that are out of my grasp. Questions that I should be able to answer will be the broader, structural kind. My past experiences with this sort of thing have shown me that for the most part professors and government bigwigs aren't interested in my methods, whether or not I've used a certain statistical test or whatever, but to use a terribly inappropriate aphorism, the "forest for the trees." I impressed my way to eight job interviews in my last year at Clemson dropping only one resume by talking to people about big pictures. Look at a forest fire and tell me who is concerned about needle length-- its not the leaf but the landscape. What is the goal of this project? How will you get there? And why the hell is it important? Why do we care about trees growing on mountains? The fact that it interests me is irrelevant. Cutting my toenails also interests me and that's not getting me anywhere in life. I can't say, well, I just want to know everything there is to know about how mountains work and how they affect forests.  Means are not ends. Unless you are a statistician, I guess.

In the 1960's, a bunch of forest rangers in the southwest were walking through a forest ravaged by fire.  In the charred woods they found a tiny bear cub, clinging to a burned tree.  They took him back to the station and nursed him to health.  At one point, a ranger, joking around, put his hat on the bear cub and took a photo. Smokey the bear is now a commonly recognized symbol of wild fire prevention.  What did Smokey do to become a hero? He was an icon of life in a dead wood. Maybe that's the key-- the hero isn't what is accomplished by the attitude with which it is presented. A scientific hero is new, fresh, and simple.  She describes the mountain forests with a passionate directness and creates applicable models for all people.  She isn't concerned with making a name for herself, but her system speaks louder than her words. Snow falls on a porch and no one hears it, but everyone knows its there and they feel different. The world is quiet and sublime.

These are ways to think of it, I suppose-- quiet and sublime-- secretly grand-- the lone spectre on the mountaintop knows that she in fact created the whole landscape in her view. Grandeur belongs to the creation; to its creator, satisfaction.