Author’s note: I’ve recently been experimenting with audio recordings of my essays, and thought that now would be a reasonable time to share one of the results. Today, I return to one of my first exercises in fictionalized non-fiction from exactly one year ago. Below is an edited, hopefully slightly improved version, now with a full audio reading. I hope you enjoy!
“The concrete highway was edged with a mat of tangled, broken, dry grass, and the grass heads were heavy with oat beards to catch on a dog’s coat… all passive, but armed with appliances of activity, still, but each possessed of the anlage of movement.” – John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
“In [physics], the normal force is the component of a contact force that is perpendicular to the surface that an object contacts… A person standing still on a platform is acted upon by gravity, which would pull them down towards the Earth's core unless there were a countervailing force from the resistance of the platform's molecules, a force which is named the ‘normal force’.” – Wikipedia
She once met a turtle in a plaid suit. Well, “met” is generous. But they sat together for quite some time, at least nine stops, from 900 W. Harrison to Jackson and Wabash. She was heading home on the CTA bus, tired with the effort of another day’s plodding, worried about the way her career had stagnated, reliving today’s chat with a professor that had squished her dreams like cement hardening around her already stuck feet. It was one of those deceptively cold sunny days of late spring in Chicago – the trees and flowers blooming but ice still in the air. The world just needed a little shift in the wind and it would all open up and be summer, but for now it was held in place by the ice in the air, as if encircled by some transparent igloo: sunshine visible, but inaccessible, walled off by its frozen glass.
Despite the chill, she was a little sweaty under the shell of her jacket, wrapped tightly around her neck. She’d seen the bus coming at Morgan Street and had half run, half power walked to beat it to the next stop, all the time trying to not look too conspicuous, too immature, too pressed for time.
She cursed herself that she couldn’t seem to outgrow this awkward run-walk habit, developed over years of perpetual tardiness. Late, she’d run down a hallway until the oppressive feeling of judgmental eyes would slow her to a lilting terrapin walk, which she’d maintain until the pressure of her lateness would again compel her back into a lurching run, pushing, til worry she’d smell would again slow her feet.
Some things never change, she thought.
Newton’s 1st law of motion, on which all physics rests, states that an object in motion will stay in motion and an object at rest will stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force. Writing in 1686, Newton changed the world with this simple observation: the natural state of an object is to keep doing what it’s doing. Said again: the universe resists change.
The bus was fairly crowded; she picked her way toward the back, trying to not hit people with her book laden hump of a backpack. There were three empty seats. Two in the back row were partially and unwelcomely covered. One contained the closed purse of an exhausted looking girl with tightly pursed lips, and the other the jacket of a multiply pierced person hiding behind their clear plastic encased phone. Not great options. But the third seat, the one a row from the back, also gave her pause: it was next to the turtle. His most prominent feature was he shell: a great plaid coat – tight knit and crisscrossed, an old golden tan, like the faded light of sunset in a once bustling town – and a soft brimmed hat – a black felt fedora straight out of a 1920s speakeasy, worn low, over his eyes. His head was pulled into his shell so that his scarf formed a great dewlap covering most of the rest of what she could see of his dark and wrinkled face.
She grabbed a handrail as the bus started to move, and considered her options. To sit in the back row would definitely create a disturbance. But to sit by the reptile, well, clearly the other passengers had avoided him: he had some of those creature-who-might-stink-sit-at-your-own-risk-if-you-know-anything-about-the-CTA vibes. She could just stand, but it’s quite a few stops, and then she would be in the way. She’d turned so she couldn’t see the turtle anymore, standing, directly next to his seat, but still clearly standing, long enough that her hesitation, though she looked the other way, was probably obvious.
She started to wonder about what this wizened creature was thinking: was he feeling the bite of yet another human avoiding that seat? Was he trying not to feel the dull cutting sensation of rejection? Or was he thinking the opposite – please don’t sit by me, leave me some space? Or, she wondered, is it just my vanity that makes me think he’s thinking of me at all?
Well, I’m certainly thinking of me, she thought. Is it my racism, my classism, my stereotypes that keep my standing? I’d like to think not. But I don’t know.
She sat by the turtle.
When any two objects come in contact with each other they experience what physicists call the normal force. The most basic force in physics, it’s the force of two objects touching, of one surface pushing on another.
The normal force is particularly prevalent as the ground underneath you: it holds you up against gravity – it keeps you from falling.
It’s also well known as the thing that holds you in place, like a chair enfolding your back or a seatbelt constricting your chest. Effective, you see, at keeping you from moving. At keeping you in your place. Further examples include the force of a cell wall, a closed door, and a concrete floor or road, holding up whatever is on it: a bus, some shoes, a turtle.
We should clarify: by “sat,” we mean “edged her way in”: first just one bun on half the seat. Not too close. For such a momentous move, nothing happened, the turtle stayed put. She examined him out of the corner of her eye. She could see his worn, but creased pants now, and his old black dress shoes. His clothing looked like it was lifted from another time, or, at least, from a thrift store. While old, there’s care worked into this shell. She wondered about where he’s going. To work? An interview? A friend’s place? A dinner party? We know so little about the lives of others. Is he lonely?
The turtle continued to look away from her, head tucked low, eyes down. Where is he coming from? she pondered. What forces keep him looking away and down? What keeps him in his shell?
His shell: she almost felt she could sense its layers, grown through years of experience as a perceived threat. Years of scared looks, people unwilling to sit by him, years of passers by crossing to the other side of the street.
His shell: is it all the protection he has? She shivered a little as the thought struck her. Me, she thought, my whiteness, my youthfulness, my education, my network: they all form a protective platform, a great plastron which keeps me safe in my daily trudging. But what protects his insides?
The normal force derives its name not from normal as “usual” or “commonplace,” but rather from the mathematical usage of normal as perpendicular, or at right angles. Normal originates from the Latin word norma, which refers to a carpenter’s T-square, a rule or standard used to define right angles, and to force structures straight. Indeed, normal lives at the juncture of two facets. As Jonathan Moorley writes: “On the one hand, normal is describing a fact in the world—a line may be orthogonal, or normal, or it may not. Normal is an objective description of that line. But a right angle, in geometry, is also good, is desirable, is a universal mathematical truth that many mathematicians, then and now, describe as a type of beauty and perfection… Normal is both a fact in the world and a judgment of what is right.”
The bus stopped by Canal and a crowd of people got off. The young man in the aisle seat in front of her quickly rose and swung into a newly open row to sit by himself. There was now another empty pair of seats a few rows up – should she move? But she remembered what her friend Micah told her the other day about the CTA. He’d described a little bond he feels with the person he’s sitting by, sharing this ride – the sweat, the smells – just millimeters apart, or perhaps even jackets touching. There’s something lovely, he said, in two strangers brought together in a little moment, a little sliver of spacetime, not talking, but together, a shared experience of the world. And so he feels sad when a different seat opens and your new companion abruptly gets up and moves: a rejection, a breaking of ties – felt as a loss.
Though she and the turtle were uncomfortably squished together on these hard blue seats, she felt a small wave of thankfulness for the company in this brief passage through the lonely expanse of space and time. She stayed where she was.
The encyclopedia notes that the “Normal force is …not a true force per se” explaining that it is the result of the trillions of microscopic interactions of electrons at the surfaces of the objects. It continues “two bodies do not penetrate each other due to the stability of matter, which is… a consequence of Pauli exclusion principle, but also of the fundamental forces of nature.”
The stops passed, people cycled on and off the bus. She’d shifted more comfortably into her seat – an inch or two closer to the still creature beside her. But she was not fully settled. Her thoughts were still fixed on the turtle. Does he think I’m afraid of him, that I dislike him? Can he sense my curiosity, my desire to share a word, to connect? Is he like me – wanting a new adventure, but contained in the structures dealt him, held in place by the myriad of invisible forces that anchor our minds?
Her mind wandered to the sermon she’d heard the previous Sunday. They’d had a guest preacher, an old baptist reverend from the west side. His great booming voice described how Jesus’s disciples quaked in a boat “buffeted by the waves because the wind was against it,” and how they cried out as Jesus, their leader and companion, approached them walking on the waves. “It’s a ghost!”
He told of the point when Peter got out of the boat and stepped on the water. “But when Peter saw the wind, he was afraid” – the reverend read, and then stopped. “Who can see the wind?!” he bellowed. “The way I see it, the wind we see is something we make up in our minds. Consider the narratives we construct! It will happen like this or so and so will think that. Invisible stories that keep us in our place! Phantoms by which we sink!”
Am I scared of the wind, she wondered, contained by its icy grip?
With even the smallest of inclines the normal force can be deceptive. Since it always acts perpendicular to a surface, if the surface you stand on is even slightly tilted, it is no longer the only force holding you counter to gravity. You might not notice. But in fact, what feels normal is no longer fully normal. You’re also now, in part, held in place by friction, a contact force parallel to any surface. Friction, that resistive force that keeps things from sliding. It’s both the normalcy of things and the friction – the way the ramp grates against your feet – that hold you there. It keeps you from falling, yes, but also perhaps, from moving at all.
They were approaching her stop. She considered which was ruder: to reach across and pull the wire herself, her arm flung across his eyes, or to ask him to pull it, possibly implying some sort of colonial structure from the history whose long fingers held them both. She reached across. Pulled the wire. The turtle remained there, still. Closed. The bus stopped. She stood to get off, but wanted the turtle to know she’d been thinking of him, that she wished him well, that she’d noticed their tiny adventure together. She glanced back. “Have a good day” she said quickly.
What happened next – a wonder. The turtle, surprised, moved. Eyes emerged, then thick lips, and then, amazing, so brief she’s wondered since then if she imagined it, a smile – a face unshadowed, transformed. “You too.”
It was only later she remembered that story she once read - some slow moving passage from a Steinbeck novel. In the story a turtle, attempting to cross a highway is struck by a truck swerving to harm it, and flipped off the road. Though upside down and hurting, the turtle moves its limbs till its legs catch a small rock to push on, and then slowly rights itself. As the turtle flips itself over an unnoticed grass head falls out of its shell, sticking seeds in the ground. As the turtle turns to continue plodding on its way its shell drags over the seeds, unintentionally planting them in the ground.
Normal forces, while important for stability, also are important as agents of change. Newton’s second law tells us that a new outside force – a push, a touch, perhaps even a kiss – changes an object’s motion: new contact creates change.
Newton’s third law tells us something more. Normal forces, it turns out, are reciprocal. If I exert a force on a turtle, it exerts a force back on me.
Off the bus, she didn’t look back as it pulled away, but instead walked with purposeful strides toward her transfer to the brown line, the next step in her journey. She heard a rumble, and hustled up the stairs: the next train was arriving, and she wanted to be on it.
Coda:
Stephen Hawking is considered one of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century, an incredible feat considering his diagnosis of an “early-onset slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease that gradually, over decades, paralysed him.” His biographers note that “After the loss of his speech, he communicated through a speech-generating device initially through use of a handheld switch, and eventually by using a single cheek muscle.”
Part of Hawking’s fame came from his work on black holes, the most inescapable objects of the universe. Nothing, it was believed, could escape a black hole, no information, no radiation. A black hole traps all light. Among other brilliant ideas, Hawking showed that this is not 100% true. If a tiny particle at the very edge of a black hole interacts with a pair particle, one of them can actually escape. According to Hawking, slowly, over time, even black holes can’t keep everything in. Thanks to the interaction of paired particles, even black holes can’t trap all the light.
Hawking’s best selling book A Brief History of Time opens with an antidote about a well known scientist lecturing on the earth’s orbit and place in space. The scientist is challenged by a woman who insists the world is a flat plate resting on the back of a giant tortoise. Hawking writes “The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, `What is the tortoise standing on?’ `You’re very clever, young man, very clever,’ said the old lady, `But it’s turtles all the way down!’” To that story Hawking adds this: “Most people would find the picture of our universe as an infinite tower of tortoises rather ridiculous, but why do we think we know better?”
An Encounter with Turtle: Forces on a Chicago Highway