Radioactivity and Agatha Christie

I love re-reading Agatha Christie novels. Better still, I've purchased many of them as audiobooks for my iPod and I listen to them over and over again while I'm doing needlepoint, housework, working out in the garden, or walking. The other day I was listening again to The Pale Horse when a particular phrase struck me. Towards the end of the story our hero, Mark Easterbrook, is summing up the evidence while sitting with Inspector Lajeune when he rattles off the line, "Because we live in fear of fallout and strontium 90 and all the rest of it, we are amendable to the suggestion along the line of scientific talk." (p. 247 in the St. Martin' Paperback edition) That made me sit up because this summer I spent some time studying up on radioactivity in anticipation of a new unit I was designing to teach this fall on nuclear chemistry.

Solution of Strontium Salt
burnt in a Bunsen Burner
Flame

All this talk of strontium-90 must have been very much on the minds of everyone during the 1950s and early 60s with the advent of the atomic bomb at the end of the Second World War, and the arms race that became the Cold War. Strontium-88 is the stable isotope and I even use a salt of strontium for a flame test when teaching chemistry. It is a component of fireworks resulting in a beautiful red color.  But strontium-90 the radioactive isotope is a by-product of Uranium-238 fission. The problem with this isotope is that the human body treats it like calcium and sequesters it in bones and teeth. In the late 50s and early 60s researchers here in the US were collecting baby teeth and testing them for the presence of strontium-90.Turns out that children born in the 60s had a higher concentration of strontium-90 in their teeth as a result of exposure from the atmospheric nuclear tests that were being conducted at that time. Eventually many countries would ban above ground testing. (Radiation: What it is, What you need to know, by Robert Peter Gale M.D. and Eric Lax, Alfred A. Knopf, c. 2013)

Of course Christie would use current events in her novels. Those details help to make her stories believable and relevant. Perhaps today's readers are very unfamiliar with the subject matter as we no longer have to fear testing as much except for those rogue nations who are trying to catch up to other nuclear states. The Cold War may be over but the threat of nuclear weaponry isn't.

It all started with a birdbath

My beautiful blue
birdbath

I fell in love with my birdbath the minute I saw it. It's rich blue color. It's lovely shape. I simply had to buy it, bring it home, and proudly display it in my garden. Over the years it has provided birds, insects, and squirrels with a much needed drink. I've only ever seen Robins bathe in it. Does my experience with a owning a birdbath make my reading of Jincy Willett's novel, Amy Falls Down more perceptive? The novel opens with Willett's character, Amy Gallup, falling in her garden and striking her head on a birdbath. The resulting head injury is but the first step on an interesting journey.

It got me thinking about how our personal experiences bring a nuance to our reading. Every reader will have a different viewpoint that they bring to the novel which the author is unaware of when he or she was writing. The author was living her own experience during the act of creation. When you stop to think about it, one novel can have a million different interpretations because no two readers are alike. Mind blowing. For example I started to wonder if you have no experience with owning a birdbath could you truly begin to understand or appreciate what it would mean to slip, fall and crack your head on the side of one? Does that even matter? Don't readers need to stretch their imaginations in order to read in the first place? Would the story have worked if she'd hit her head on a garden seat or even a patio brick? Did it need to happen outdoors? Would falling down and hitting the edge of a sink or the tub work just as well? Or am I just over thinking this? Perhaps I should just relax and enjoy the story. Which I can honestly say I did.

Now my teenagers talk about making references in conversation all of the time, things they have seen on TV or the Web that others their age have also experienced. While reading Willett's book there were several things that she mentioned that struck chords with some of my memories and I began to wonder if other readers would recognize these references. She mentions Amy's obscure books on disasters which included the Hartford Circus Fire. Now I grew up well after this event but just outside of Hartford, CT where the story still carried some fascination. My experience with this story comes from a documentary film that had been produced about this horrific event and the focus on a six-year old little girl who was never identified. If you are of an age (mid-40s) maybe you remember the film projector and its clickity-clacking noise softly in the background as the story on the screen unfolded. The movie scared me. Years later as an adult a Hartford Courant story about how new forensic techniques could help identify the unclaimed bodies, led me to explain to my parents about the bizarre movie and how it had unsettled me as a child. We even went to see the Ringling Bros. Circus for a school field trip in the Hartford Civic Center once it had been repaired after the roof collapsed in 1978.  It was just this brief comment in the book, but my mind rapidly opened up and relived those memories. A thousand other people could read the same sentence and it might mean absolutely nothing to them. See what I mean about how personal experiences shape our reading.

The Sweet Life

Bee food - Bee Balm

Very often when we are so caught up in trying to get the "big picture" we can over look the tiny bits. For example, my love of gardening. My garden wouldn't be nearly as beautiful and abundant if I didn't have the assistance of my little pollinating friends the honey bees. My vegetable garden certainly would be empty without them. Let's face it so would the supermarket shelves. We humans often forget the work that nature must carry out in order to provide us with sustenance.

Millions and millions of years ago, angiosperm plants (those that flower) evolved a form of reproduction that required a little help. The gymnosperms had been using the wind for years, but that doesn't always work effectively. Flowers began making nectar as a way of tempting bees and other pollinating insects, birds, and even bats into helping with their sexual relations. The pay off for the pollinator was the delicious nectar, the plant got genetic variety. With time both flowers and their pollinators co-evolved to have a special relationship. Along comes the human who begins to care for the honey bee and our sweet tooth is satisfied. Over the years humans have developed all kinds of tricks for "raising" bees and harvesting their product.

Hannah Nordhaus's The Beekeeper's Lament, was a fascinating read. As a biology/ecology teacher I had been keeping an eye on articles that described the concern over the death of so many bee hives over the past few years. Nordhaus follows the path of John Miller a bee keeper who trucks his hives from one field to another in aid of pollinating major fruit crops. He's not alone. The food industry which is worth billions depends on many people like John to provide bees in order to pollinate vast quantities of fruit and nut crops: almonds, apples, oranges, blueberries, cranberries, to name just a few.

The European honey bee first made it to the shores of the United States with the colonists who needed pollinators familiar with the crops they were bringing with them. The native pollinators had not evolved to pollinate these new and unfamiliar plants. It didn't take long for the European bee to expand its territory from sea to shining sea. Talk about a melting pot. Not only are we a mix of races and cultures, we've brought plants from all over the world to our country.

But it is a tough world out there for the bee. They can be victims of bacterial and fungal infections for which they receive antibiotic or fungicide treatments. Then there is the varroa mite which can over run a hive. Beetles, skunks, and bears will all take their turns raiding a hive. Bees are very susceptible to pesticides and herbicides. And the worst is Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) where bees just abandon the hive for no reason. Many blamed genetically modified crops.

What's so important about this issue? With seven billion of us on the planet and growing, we need a lot of food. In order to get a lot of food, we will need a lot of bees. So what can we do? A growing concern not just for bees but for plants themselves is monoculture. Raising large amounts of a single crop by which we are losing the biodiversity of plants. It turns out bees like variety in their diet, we could probably benefit from the same. The growing number of lawns (pun intended) results in very little food for the bee. What we need to do is to plant meadows with lots of flowering plants to encourage pollinators, and watch out for the amount of pesticides that are applied to our yards. That will benefit the quality of our ground water as well.

What we need most is to regain a sense of our role in the natural world. We spend too much time in the city, in our houses losing connection with our environment. No wonder apocalypse games and movies are so popular - people fear the end when nature will work to over come the damage we've inflicted upon it. Instead let's get out there and repair the damage we've done. As consumers we can help the shift of current agricultural practices by purchasing organic products. Even better learn to grow a vegetable or two in your yard, on the patio, or even your windowsill or front stoop. A tomato plant, cucumber, pot of fresh herbs, it's a thrill to cook up something that you've grown yourself. Nothing like it in the world. Share those excess tomatoes and zucchinis with friends and neighbors. There are plenty of tasty recipes out there on the Internet. Let's be old fashion again and get back to the soil, tend it, nurture it, and love it.