Flutter
Poetry Journal
| Poet’s Memoir Charts Internal and External Journeys By Kathryn Good-Schiff The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory by Kenny Fries (Carroll & Graf, 2007) is a thought-provoking and illuminating read due to its nuanced discussion of the development of scientific theories and its honest account of one man’s experience of living and adventuring despite (or because of?) his physical disability. The thought comes to mind that it should be required reading for all high school biology students—if only we lived in a world where that might occur. As the title suggests, the book tells two parallel stories. Fries succinctly relates the lives and travels of Charles Darwin and the lesser-known Alfred Charles Wallace as they worked both separately and together toward a theory of the origin of species and an understanding of biological diversity. Interwoven with this account are detailed scenes from Fries’s own life as he travels the world in his customized orthopedic shoes, lives with the challenges of his physical disability, and questions the values society places on certain traits. “Who decides riding a motorcycle is cool whereas riding a wheelchair is not?” he queries. One of the messages revealed through the narrative is that adaptations and the idea of “fitness” are comprehensible only in context. Changing the context can add or remove the advantages of a genetic accident. Fries describes how he hiked the Beehive, a steep trail in Acadia National Park where travelers must climb iron ladders up and down a cliff face. “What is a five-foot-tall man without fibulae in both legs doing at the top of this mountain?” he asks. The surprise in this scene is that Fries’s boyfriend, Ian, who is tall and athletic, has more trouble climbing the Beehive than Fries does. The author’s special shoes actually become an advantage, a successful adaptation for finding small footholds on the ladders. Ian is Fries’s foil in the narrative, another human with his own set of abilities and disadvantages. Ian is tall and has ADD, making him—in Fries’s interpretation—the perfect hunter of the hunter-gatherer age, but less well-suited for the era of computers, office work, and master’s theses. By selecting what details to portray in the Balinese jungle or in the Galapagos Islands, Fries also draws understated yet powerful parallels between himself and Ian, and some of the rare species they encounter on their travels. One chapter shows Fries in his kitchen, examining human inventions, seeing them as adaptations for survival: “So is the refrigerator, the stove, even the table and chairs—all that evolutionary backache we avoid by not sitting on the ground...” The reader is left with the strong impression that we humans are situated well within the context of evolution, change, and adaptation, despite the common feeling that humans are somehow removed from or separate from nature. The message is one of constant change: “Was it possible that traits thought to be desirable today, would be viewed otherwise in the future?” When set in the context of a memoir about disability, the “evolution of Darwin’s theory” takes on added meaning. It becomes clear that all humans—not just people with special shoes—have developed adaptations that help us in our current situations, but might not always do so if we are not open to difference and change now and in the future. |
