A Walk with David Quammen
By Stephen Alexander
Learning about the Science Essay while Walking in Nature
There is a wetland area a short walk away from my home in southwest Portland, Oregon. I have often stopped there to watch Rough-winged swallows darting about as they forage for insects. The wetlands are also a favorite resting spot for great blue herons. Those enormous birds were always more captivating to me than the little swallows that arrive each year in early spring. Then, I read The Swallow that Hibernates Underwater by David Quammen.
Reading that essayfelt like the first time I read The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway, or On the Road by Jack Kerouac. Hemingway’s short, declarative sentences made me want to be a writer. Kerouac’s spontaneous prose set me free to travel the world as a seeker. Quammen’s ability to blend narrative and exposition showed me the beautiful brilliance achievable in the very best science writing.
Quammen’s legendary writing career has spanned six decades. He is a celebrated essayist and the award-winning author of 18 books. After months of binge-reading Quammen’s writing, Swallow, remained my favorite. The tale of 18th century English naturalist Gilbert White and his beliefs about swallows was mournfully sad and yet filled with hope. It was not just that it moved me. It was that it was written by an author who was everything that I wanted to be as a writer.
I came to science writing in my late 30s. I am a sportswriter and book critic by trade. I reached a point where I did not want to spend weekends away from my family covering games. I found that I preferred to spend my nights reading Curious George to my daughter, Morgan, rather than writing a review of the latest bestseller. I meandered my way into technical writing and from there into broader science writing. In today’s political climate, with pseudoscience often serving as the lingua franca of discourse, good science journalism like Quammen writes and like I aspire to write is beyond imperative.
Old book scribe habits die hard, for me. I found myself reaching out to Quammen for an interview. I said that I wanted to write an essay about him in the spirit of his Swallow essay on Gilbert White. Really, I just wanted to stand in proximity to greatness in the hope that I could absorb some of it. I requested a phone call with Quammen. I like to do interviews while walking, if possible. The world floating by helps me think. While I live in a very urban area, my little pocket of the Pacific Northwest is filled with wildlife. It seemed fitting to be outside while talking to a famous science and nature writer.
When it is time for the interview, I grab my phone and digital recorder. Walter, a two-year-old rescue pug who my family adopted just 10 days earlier, races toward me. He has learned that he is usually invited on my walks. “Sorry, boy,” I say. “I can’t hold the phone, recorder and the leash.” The pug looks a bit bent out of shape. He just has to deal.
I step outside, dial Quammen and begin walking.
There is a flowering currant at the end of my driveway where a green Anna’s hummingbird is floating in midair, eating a late winter meal. I can hear the thwacking of its wings as I walk by.
Over 700 miles away in Bozeman, Montana, Quammen is finishing the day at his desk. He is working on an essayist biography of Jane Goodall, and he is reading everything he can about the famed primatologist. Quammen sends a shiver down my spine when he tells me that his office features a tank containing a seven-year-old rescue python named Boots.
I tell Quammen that my rescue pug would probably be a tasty snack for Boots.
“You know, the Python is pretty big, but not big enough to eat a pug,” Quammen says.
Regardless, I am certain that Walter would prefer spending time with the other members of the menagerie kept by Quammen and his wife, the author Betsy Gaines Quammen. The Quammens have two Russian wolfhounds named Manny and Bunny, a half Russian wolfhound named Bradley (“the little black dog”) and a rescue cat named Oscar.
I walk by a tree where a garter snake often lays up to rest. I am really, really not a snake person. I always give the tree and the snake a wide berth.
Quammen, who recently turned 78, tells me that he likes to break up his workday by taking his dogs out for walks. It is good practice for one of the most important parts of his job as a science writer. Quammen has spent his career traveling to amazing locations and going on adventures with incredible scientists. A notable example is when Quammen walked through large stretches of the Congo River Basin with biologist J. Mike Fay before writing the epic Megatransect series for National Geographic.
“I’ve spent a lot of time walking through some pretty wild places with some pretty interesting people,” Quammen says.
A cold wind is blowing. I walk along the path where I have seen coyotes running toward something at a dead sprint. I love these occasional encounters. I always find myself thinking of all the Native American myths about Coyote, the trickster god.
Quammen tells me that he came to science writing after struggling to find a foothold in the publishing world as a novelist. While he was able to publish a few books of fiction, it was not a sustainable profession.
“I turned to nonfiction writing for two reasons,” Quammen says. “One: I was a middle-class white male from a happy childhood in Ohio. So, who needs that person to be a novelist? Two: I didn’t have enough life experience to have more novels brimming inside me.”
Obscenely well-educated does not quite capture Quammen’s academic background. He got his undergraduate degree from Yale and then attended Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. Quammen still fondly remembers his mentor at Yale, the American poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren. Quammen studied the novels of his own hero, William Faulkner, at Warren’s knee. Warren even helped Quammen publish his first book of fiction.
There are no swallows or great blue herons to be seen as I walk along the paved trail beside the wetland area. There is, however, an enormous flock of Canada geese wandering around the muddy edges of the water.
Quammen tells me that despite his academic credentials his education was less than well-rounded. “A child of the late 60s,” he was allowed to pour himself into literature classes with few other subjects to round out the curriculum. Quammen took just one science course in college, a biology class that he remembers not even being a very good one. It might seem strange that someone who had so little experience in science would become a science writer. But Quammen believes his lack of formal science education is part of his secret sauce.
“That was an advantage for me,” Quammen says. “I could relate so well to readers who were not scientists, but who wanted to know about science. I remember what it’s like to be ignorant of science and to come at it as an outsider.”
Another reason for Quammen’s success is that his work is often laugh-out-loud funny. Even when writing about serious science, Quammen is unafraid to crack a joke. He is, however, superstitious enough to be afraid to actually say that he is funny.
“You never want to say, ‘I’m good at making people laugh,’” Quammen says. “You’ll jinx yourself and the gift or the magic goes away. But I will say that I’ve always been a smart aleck, so I was always interested in trying to make people laugh.”
The sun peeks out from behind the clouds. I walk through an open meadow where deer often graze. It has not rained in several days, and the ground is packed solid.
I tell Quammen that his one college science class has me beat. I did not take a single science class after 10th grade. Science writing did not come naturally to me the way writing about sports and books did. Science is the hardest, most complicated subject I have ever written about. I liked doing something hard by choice.
Quammen cut his teeth as a journalist writing monthly essays for Outside Magazine. Once a month, for 15 years, Quammen would go into a panic and dig through his files for essay ideas. He usually settled on something he found odd, like the piece on hibernating swallows. At that point, he would spend three or four days madly researching.
“I would follow the vector of what was important about the subject but not necessarily interesting and the vector of what was interesting about the subject but not necessarily important, until they crossed somewhere in intellectual space,” Quammen says. “At the point where they crossed, I would say, ‘aha!’ that’s the core of my essay.”
I smell wood burning from an unseen campfire as I pass a refuse area where I once watched a racoon struggle to figure out how to open a tamperproof trash can.
I tell Quammen that I have sometimes found it challenging to unlock the essay as a narrative vehicle for science writing. It turns out that I am in good company. For an elite science essayist, Quammen himself has to essentially deliver an oral essay just to define his specialty.
“It’s a piece of writing that explores a subject, but also explores what the writer thinks about that subject,” Quammen says. “It contains observation, meditation and opinion. But most essays don’t necessarily require that the writer is making a strong case for a point of view.”
After a pause, Quammen seems to find the crossing point of vectors in intellectual space.
“This is going to sound maybe glib and maybe stupid, but it’s what’s occurring to me right now, Stephen,” Quammen says. “Maybe an essay is a piece of writing in which a writer explores a subject, and the possible ways of thinking about a subject, the way you explore a cough drop in your mouth.”
While Quammen became known for his essays, his full-length books have launched him into the science writing stratosphere. The Song of the Dodo won the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing. Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic (winner of the 2013 Science in Society Book Award) was terrifyingly omniscient of the soon to arrive COVID-19 pandemic. And Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus was a 2022 National Book Award Finalist.
Heavy, grey rain clouds chase away the sliver of sun. I turn down a path where skunks frequently roam. I do a quick scan to ensure none of those rascals are around. Getting sprayed is near the bottom of my to do list.
Quammen tells me that he breaks his work into three separate stages. The first phase is field research where he travels the world and spends time with people. The second stage is also research, but it happens at home. This is when he reads everything he can about his chosen subject, like he is doing now with Jane Goodall. Then, finally, Quammen puts pen to paper.
“Some writers hate to write, and they’re scared to write,” Quammen says. “They say that they don’t like writing, they simply like having written. But I enjoy writing. That’s the most enjoyable phase for me.”
During this phase, Quammen wakes early along with Bradley. Quammen takes “the little black dog” for a walk in the dark, makes himself coffee, has a few spoonfuls of yogurt and sits down at his desk. He spends half an hour or so reading to wake up his brain. When he is fully alert, Quammen will spend five or six hours writing, breaking somewhere in the middle for a brunch and to walk the other two dogs.
“I write until my brain is fried and I’m exhausted,” Quammen says. “If I’m lucky, my output for the day is two or three pages.”
A Cooper’s hawk circles overhead, looking for its dinner. From hundreds of feet up in the air, the bird of prey sees an entire world of which I am unaware.
As Quammen finishes describing his workflow, I know I have everything I need for the essay I want to write. I would like to go on talking to Quammen for as long as I can. He is kind and funny and absurdly smart and beyond generous. I know, though, that I must let him go.
I tell Quammen how very grateful I am that he has taken the time to speak to me. “For me,” I say, “this is like you getting to talk to Faulkner.” Then, I force myself to say goodbye so I can get back to my new dog.
“I’m sure Walter is going to be a great friend to you, and vice versa,” Quammen says.
It is beginning to grow dark as I hang up. I look around, hoping that I might see a wandering swallow. I do not, of course. That would have been all too perfect. I will see the swallows and so much else again on another walk.
I think of what Quammen said about, “walking through some pretty wild places with some pretty interesting people.” I would never have a chance to go fishing with Ernest Hemingway or take a drive with Jack Kerouac. But I had just gone for a walk with David Quammen.
