The Heartland, Dark Matter, and the Breeze Beneath the Door

I have been in cities too long--and do not live in a city. As we have traveled and read and talked about Steinbeck and the fifty-year anniversary of his trip, I have listened to Sherman and Cait and Clay and Al and David work through their thoughts on "rootedness" and "home" and "family" and their visions of where we have gone wrong as a nation and a people.  We have talked and I have watched Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and now Minnesota unfold outside the windows.  I had forgotten how rich the farmland is in the midwest.  The dirt seems saturated and dark with life.  Farms here appear prosperous.  I am surprised at both quantity and prosperity.  Perhaps from this distance it is imagined.

Fermi National Accelerator Lab rose as naturally as anything else planted in the heartland.  We were greeted on the steps of Wilson Hall by our docent, Felicia Svoboda, who led us through a tour of the facility that ended with a full hour Q and A with Dr. Elvin Harms that began with what appeared to be the mildest and simplest introductory remark:  "At Fermi we make knowledge."  Other facilities in other places develop commercial applications--and MANY of Fermi's discoveries are used daily to improve the quality of our lives--but at Fermi Lab they focus on what we might think of as the pursuit of intrinsic knowledge.  Knowledge for knowledge's sake.  I do not mean to suggest that they are not conscious that their work improves the nation and the world, but when your focus examines the smallest particles of the cosmos to understand the biggest of all pictures-- the universe-- the extent of our ignorance is vast.  I like to know that we do not know.  If 95% of the universe is still unknown to us, if beyond the room of our knowledge, we barely perceive the breeze beneath the door, how much more we have to do.  What will inspire the next generation to innovations we have as yet not even dreamed?

Every scientists I have spoken with in planning for this trip has mentioned, and Dr. Harms was in this regard no different, that "green energy" should be the focus of our future--and might, like the "Space Race" be the thing that inspires our nation and jerks us up out of our complacency.  After our day at Fermi, after visions of the cosmos and the smallest particles that make it up, during Q and A we return to our little spot on the planet, in our little place on that planet, and wonder about our own responsibilities for the future.

As we later drove through miles of pastoral farmland, Dark Matter surrounded me and the Tau Neutrino
(along with several others) passed through me.  These problems will not be mine.  These problems of global collaboration and future resources, of inspiring the future generations of great minds to do that good work is not my work.  The young men and women traveling in this van and their friends and colleagues have worlds on worlds to discover and hard, good work to do.  I am blessed to have been here today, with my nose pressed to the crack beneath the door, to feel that breeze of a future I will not see.  It does not frightened me to know that I will never know.  Listening to my fellow travelers, I am content to leave it in their hands.

~ Margaret Downs-Gamble