Hudson and Evolution

“It’s hard to say where we began.”

-Hudson

When I ask Hud about evolution, he sits for a minute. We’ve just finished dinner and I know he’s waiting for me to excuse him from the table to go play Xbox. First, he’s got to talk to me. He’s slightly annoyed with all the question I’ve been asking him for the blog, but he’s also flattered and says that one day he’d like to go “viral.” I’m merely the person that is going to get him there.

“Evolution’s been around for millions and billions of years,” he says, “I know we started from monkeys like in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Their chests are broader. And they have pink asses.” He’s only allowed to say the word “ass” around me, and uses it at every opportune time. I expected this answer. I don't know if he’s even seen Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, but Hud has always managed to find a movie reference to just about anything.

I remember when we were younger and Hudson was obsessed with watching these documentaries from BBC called Walking with Dinosaurs. Eventually he moved on to other movies from the same collection. I remember one road trip where we sat next to each other in the backseat of our parent’s station wagon with a portable DVD player between us and watched Walking with Beasts, which moved into post-dinosaur time. The only thing I remember from the documentary was the segment about early prehistoric apes, what would one day be humans. And, like all documentaries, they had to show us what sex was like way back when. Except the people at BBC decided it looked too much like humans having sex, and so they pixelated it. You still got the basic picture though, and it was the first time I had ever seen two people having sex.

I ask Hud if he remembers the monkeys in the documentary, and he says that that was the documentary that got him into thinking about evolution. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes was his follow-up source.

Hudson’s got a friend name Harry Jr. who doesn't believe in evolution. Harry grew up in the Baptist Church, his dad is our veterinarian. His parents are the age of my grandparents. All that aside, Harry is Hudson’s best friend. I was sitting in the car with them one day, and listened to Hudson try to explain evolution to Harry. Harry wasn't buying it. Harry called Hudson crazy and I could see from the rear view mirror that Hudson didn't really know how his best friend couldn't understand something that was so essential to Hudson's knowledge.

I don't blame Harry for thinking Hudson’s crazy. He didn't make a very compelling case because he’s eleven. He isn't a monkey researcher or a biologist. He doesn't have all the facts yet and when he goes full steam ahead at Harry screaming something about apes and their broad chests, it turns into something from The Road Runner Show with a little Hudson cutout in the wall of Harry's iron constitution. I know that Hudson will run into dozens of kids like Harry Jr. just as I have, and will just have to avoid these kinds of subjects. After a few moments of silence, Hudson changed the subject to the Xbox game they were playing earlier, rated E for everyone.

Hudson and Fishing

"I could tell it was a king crab because of the kind of bumps it had on it. And they go crazy for some chicken."

-Hudson

Hudson considers himself to be a man of the sea, like Quint from Jaws, but without all the facial hair. But Hudson is actually just very proficient in the small fish population that inhabit Nantucket, a small island off the coast of Massachusetts, where Hudson and I spend our summers at our grandmother’s cottage.

The problem with fishing in Nantucket is that as a kid, my dad reeled in striped bass and bluefish on the regular, and this was during the off season. Nantucket fishing, usually peaks in mid to late September, but bass and bluefish are most often caught in November. I remember as a kid being so impressed and in love with my dad when he caught fish half the size as me.

Now we catch spider crab, scup the size of my hands cupped together, and sea robin that look like some mutation between a trout and a bird. The only things we take home are scup where we scrap small filets off their delicate bodies and fry them in a pan drizzled with lemon juice.

My dad met his two best friends fishing on Nantucket, sharing bait or beer, and the three of them still bring their families to the island every summer. But we don't fish together anymore, and if we do, half the kids don't want any part of it. Hudson usually complains about night fishing because there is nothing to see and we can only listen for the splash of fin surfacing. The thrash of a body. We dare each other to wade in the cold water blind. I’ve lost interest as well because we don't hear the fish anymore. But as soon as we touch the sand and we hear my dad send his first cast into the water, Hud’s in. He wants the rod for himself. He wants to catch striper so freaking bad because it’s such a rarity.

I don't know if Hud understands that there aren't anymore bluefish that make our father cry happy tears. These hard, crustacean animals and smelly sea robins are surviving because no one wants them. The internet will tell you they make a nice fillet, but they don't. The smell of sea bottom never leaves. Fresh striped bass goes for fifteen dollars a pound on the island.

Hudson says that the fish are just hiding, or blames it on the fact that the landscape of the island is constantly changing. Hud get the small scale things. He understands that we cut down too many trees, trash on the side of the road is dangerous to deer, and trash in the ocean is dangerous for penguins. He’s seen Happy Feet. But what he hasn't added up (yet) is all the pieces. The cause and the effect haven't formed an equation for him yet. And so he sends another cast into the water, I hear it fly through the water, and I know he won’t catch anything before the weight even hits the water.

Hudson and the B-52's

“Rock Lobster is just better than the stuff we listen to today with all those electronic sounds.”

-Hudson

Whenever I come home, I hear from behind Hudson’s closed bedroom door, the B-52’s single “Rock Lobster” playing on repeat. It’s kind of my least part of coming home from boarding school. The song has the phrase “rock lobster” roughly twenty times. Now multiple Ricky Wilson screaming it times forty.

It started last fall when my uncle gave Hudson a record player for his birthday. Hud and my uncle had been listening to records for the past few months, and Hud cried a little when he opened the box and a small collection of records fell out. He also cried over his Xbox.

I can walk into Hudson’s room and see him sitting at his desk with his back to me, facing the window. He’s drawing, or maybe building some sort of warship out of Legos. Usually the record player is sitting next him on the desk or on his lower bunk, playing “Rock Lobster.” It’s kind of the worst song ever. The music video is made up of plastic lobsters and a woman with a wide mouth draped in orange boas while Fred Schneider and Ricky Wilson lose their absolute shit over Rock Lobster in the background.

The funny thing about Hudson’s recent record-playing obsession is that the kids at my school are doing the exact same thing. Going vinyl is the cool thing now, just like all the hipsters who like Doctor Who and use their typewriters in Central Park (An exaggeration, but you get the point.) Hudson likes Doctor Who just as much as the girl who lives across the hall from me with her life-sized Matt Damon posters. Yes, plural. But Hudson loves Doctor Who for the science (or lack of) in the show. He’s loves records for different reasons too. The God-awful 80’s songs aren't available on iTunes, and he looks at record purchasing as a financial investment. He told me that these records are rare and that one day, he’ll be able to sell them for a lot, he means a lot, of money. Honestly, he’s sounds like my uncle who is a forty year old man who grew up on vinyl, and spends Saturdays at the Jockey Lot looking for vinyl.

Maybe some of my blatant aversion to the song is that Hudson went from eleven to forty in what feels like five minutes. And I think my parents have grown a special place in their hearts for “Rock Lobster.” They are immune to it. And when I come home, I am constantly reminded that Hudson has new interests that he came up with all on his own and I’m not there to watch. And I know that I sound like some parents who only gets to see their kids on the weekend. I know that I just need to let this bikini whale make its way through Hudson’s life and restrain from snapping the record in half like a rice cracker.

Hudson and Cheeseburgers

“It’s just the kind of flavor that is amazing.”

-Hudson {When discussing the flavor of a bacon cheeseburger.}

In the middle of Lexington, North Carolina sits Lexington Barbecue #1 with, by popular opinion, the best vinegar barbecue in the state. While the menu has everything you would expect out of a BBQ joint, you just need two things: their pulled pork and blood coleslaw.

And Hudson ordered a cheeseburger. Just like he does every time we eat out. A plain cheeseburger with bacon and lettuce. But here in the heart of Pulled Pork Land, my mother couldn't have her son eating a preformed, individually packaged slab of what might not be meat. It’s not Lexington Barbecue #1’s fault, they just have much more important things to worry about like getting the right vinegar to meat drippings ratio in the coleslaw.

We drove three hours to the restaurant and we were supposed to meet my cousins, but when we failed to account for afternoon traffic going through Charlotte, NC, we ended up arriving in Lexington thirty minutes before closing time which is nine o’clock. This didn't seem to be a problem because the restaurant was still full of baseball teams and other large groups of people each talking over each other.

We didn't really pick up the menus, we were hungry and would eat whatever the nice waitress who looked like my grandmother put in front of us, preferably meat. My mom and I ordered, and then the waitress turned to Hudson where he ordered his usual. My mother must have regained semi-consciousness at this point because after the waitress left, she explained to Hud that when we are in a burger joint, we eat burgers, when we are at a seafood place, we eat fish. My mother is very passionate about ordering what a restaurant is good at. Hudson got all teary and said he just felt like an idiot.

Same thing happened to me. I always tried to order chicken salad at places that shouldn't be making chicken salad (Chick-fil-a was oddly disappointing in that department). But after a while I got over my little obsession of mayonnaisey-chicken mounded together, and moved on to more important things, like appreciating really good barbecue. And I know that Hudson is still in this little obsession, and maybe it was the tear or the long hours in traffic, but all this kid wanted was a cheeseburger with lettuce and bacon and who are we to tell him no?

Hudson and Nurse Sharks

“Tiger Sharks are a bit more effective than Great Whites.”

-Hudson

When my mother told me and Hudson that we were going to Curacao for spring break to snorkel, Hudson furrowed his brow much like a concerned cartoon character and said that his eczema would pose a problem. The problem with having chronically itchy skin and the self-control of an eleven year old, is that small open scratches tend to pop up between his fingers, the crook of his elbows, and backs of his knees. He’s had it since he was born, and besides the potential threat of death by shark via droplet of blood in the water, he’s never been bothered by it.

We never saw any sharks, or any other large animal that goes into attack mode at the scent of blood. We did see Nurse sharks at the aquarium though. Twelve grown Nurse sharks swimming over top one another in two feet of water. A situation such as this seemed normal in this aquarium home to a lot of empty tanks, unsupervised petting pools, and more than one dead fish.

It was feeding time for the sharks and we lined up next to the shallow tank. They could tell it was feeding time, and were beginning to pile on top of each other near the trainer so that dorsal fins were peeking out of the water. Hudson and I were given a metal loop with a fish carcass strung onto it like a pasta necklace. There was a huge sucking sound as a Nurse shark lurched it’s body forward and consumed the fish. The other sharks thrashed in the water, sloshing it out onto the floor. After feeding, the trainer took each of our hands and ran them along the bumpy back of the sharks. I asked her why they were so bumpy, and Hudson butted in with “they’re reptilian, what do you expect?”

They’re reptilian, what do you expect. This is the child who calls himself “The Biologist.”

Sometimes I forget that he’s eleven and that he doesn’t know everything. He didn't notice the discrepancies in the aquarium, he was too wrapped up in explaining the decline of the lionfish.

When I imagine Hudson getting attacked by a shark, I don't see us in the middle of the ocean. I see us inside the shark tank, fighting over a dirty fish carcass. He sees that scene out of Finding Nemo where the recovering blood-aloic is set off from Dory’s bloody nose.

Hudson and Legos

"I like them because you don't have to worry about the laws of physics or science or anything."
-Hudson

For a whole summer Hudson and I sat at the coffee table in our living room and built Lego houses with expansive floor plans on green tile, because we didn't know how second stories worked. When he was little, before he knew how to put the pieces together, I assembled the sets Santa or the Easter Bunny brought him, not really caring what the final product looked like. I liked following step-by-step instructions. I was a surrogate worker for Anglerfish, dump trucks, Deathstars, a zoo. He reached a certain age where fine motor skills and concentration kicked in, and he didn't need me anymore.

Even now the instructions are irrelevant to him, and he has become the sole architect. I just get to watch. He builds me a house of pieces left over from what looks like a monster truck. I live in a small green and red roofless house where the kitchen and bathroom share a faucet, and the bedroom has glass walls that used to be truck windows. My sofa is made out of old tires. It is a sparsely furnished house. In the layout though, I see remnants of our own house, the real house which we are living now, and this gives me a sense of security. This is where Hudson has grown up, this is where he gets his ideas, where he creates.

For Christmas, Hudson received a Lego Star Wars Trade Federation Multi Troop Transport. It was 1,000 pieces, looked like a giant brown slug, and I wanted nothing more than to put it all together. It didn't really matter what I was building, just looking at the end product, feeling some sense of accomplishment is what I get out of piecing together tiny Legos. As Hudson pieced it together, I sat back and watched for a little while, like I was supposed to, but then as Hudson lost stamina/interest, he let me take over and finish the contraption, running back and forth to the kitchen to get more peppermint bark for us to share. We watched Food Network. It was just like our old agreement—I put it together, he gets the end product. I feel protective of this agreement, because I feel a reliance on me, but then I think of my monster truck house and I don’t think the alternative is all that bad.

Hudson and Dinosaurs

“According to the history, the crocodile is the closest living relative to the dinosaurs.”

-Hudson

At the age of eleven I had one fear. I was afraid of the disease where your muscles, connective tissues, and ligaments ossify, encasing your body in an exoskeleton of collagen. I was afraid of turning into Harry Eastlack, the stone man, who looked like spiders had woven webs of bone inside him. I didn't want my skeleton memorialized in a laboratory with scientists trying to find their way inside my impenetrable bone shell. While it only affects one out of every two million people, and I shouldn't have feared it, it’s like hemophilia in your bones. Once they started growing everywhere, they don't stop.

From the age of three to about nine, Hudson’s life revolved around dinosaurs. Specifically dinosaur documentaries, which we had an entire collection of, each video covering an era of dinosaur existence. They were called Walking with Dinosaurs. Road trips were timed in how many eras of dinosaurs we could get through. The drive from South Carolina to our grandparents house in North Carolina took us from the Triassic through the middle of the Cretaceous, while trips to New York to see our aunt took us all the way to the Mesozoic, which ends with the explosive extinction of the dinosaurs. The years that followed Walking with Dinosaurs were riddled with trips to the Museum of Natural History in New York, Jurassic Park on Ice (much like Disney Princesses on Ice, but with dinosaurs), dinosaur themed birthday parties and Halloween costumes. The only books he would read had to have some sort of dinosaur on the cover.

For Hudson’s fifth birthday, he received one of those Excavate Your Own Dinosaur Kits where polyresin dinosaur parts are sealed in gypsum sand and the kit includes something like a toothpick and a toothbrush to find you dinosaur. I had experienced these before. We had small ones as party favors at Hudson’s previous dinosaur birthdays, but this one was huge. It had something like five dinosaurs in it, all broken down and scattered throughout the cinder block-sized dig site.

I remember watching Hud hunch over the block, holding the toothpick loosely like he held a pencil. Sometimes I helped speed things along by cracking the block open with a hammer, or breaking off large chunks of empty sand, but when the rib cages came out with sand still stuck firmly in between the rib, I thought about Harry Eastlack and spaces in his body that were covered in bone, much more permanent than these slightly sandy dinosaurs. I was bothered by the fact that Hudson didn't even clear all the sand out of the the dinosaur's ribs before snapping their flimsy parts together. I realized that all we have left of Harry and the dinosaurs are their skeletons that at one time housed living beings, and fueled their everyday activities, or froze them. I thought about the people of Pompeii, covered in volcanic ash. Mummies frozen on their knees, praying.

This year, for my seventeenth birthday, Hudson gave me a white journal with green dinosaurs on the cover. He specified to me that while Spinosaurus and T-Rex are in the same habitat on this cover, they did not live on the same continent or even during the same time period. He drew me a birthday card where two dragon-like dinosaurs have speech bubbles, wishing me a happy birthday. He is the same brother I watched six years ago dig up dinosaurs from sand. While, maybe his obsession with dinosaurs has waned slightly, he still is completely in love with them. It’s like that ex-boyfriend you never got over.

Hudson still has a favorite dinosaur, although it changes frequently. Like how every once in a while, you check up on that ex-boyfriend, see how they're doing. As of yesterday it is the Spinosaurus. And get this: he told me that the Spinosaurus actually absorbed sunlight through its “sail,” boosting the giant reptile’s metabolism. “No, I’m dead serious,” he said, waving his hands closer and closer to my face, “Spinosaurus actually gained energy, increased bite force, and muscle power from his sail.” I looked it up. The kid is right. Spinosaurus couldn't spend long periods in the dark, just like a plant.

Right now Hudson and I exist in two worlds that don't orbit the same rings, except for brief moments when we connect like when discussing crocodiles and their close relations to dinosaurs, or the discrepancies on the cover of my new journal. When we dug up dinosaurs, I made revelations about the permanence and impermanence of our bodies, while Hudson became frustrated with the rock-hard sand separating him from his toys. In twenty years, this difference in ages will be nonexistent. Even now, he still lives totally and completely in his own world, the world of an eleven year-old boy, where the only thing he needs from me is someone to relay his scientific findings to, a warm body that will listen to him talk.

Hudson and Americans

“Did you know Sophie, that technically there is no such thing as an American.”

   -Hudson

And so I ask him about the Native Americans, not to be mistaken with Indians. I had been recently re-reading The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, and so the topic of Native Americans was on my mind. Hudson ignores my question for a little while.

The two of us are floating in a hot tub the temperature of two hour bathwater, overlooking the Caribbean Sea. We are spending spring break in Curacao with our mother, an island of cacti, Dutch food and a history of lucrative slave trade. We spend early mornings snorkeling, and tanning on man made resort beaches and our afternoons sightseeing. Yesterday it was the aquarium with suspiciously empty tanks, and shallow water in which wounded nurse sharks swim circles around each other. Today it was the Kura Hulanda Museum of Slavery. Hudson hated it.

Maybe it was the cages, or the neck braces with spikes protruding outward to prevent sleep. Maybe it was the basement constructed to simulate being in the bottom of a slave ship, shackled inches from other humans. But Hud did not want to partake in the learning. He didn't care that the only export on the island came from the Sint Marie salt ponds because the climate of the island was too dry to farm. He didn't care that the people of Curacao say that slavery ended in 1964 with Martin Luther King Jr. He sat on a bench outside the Voodoo Building, and pouted. Something was clearly bothering him. Maybe it was the fact that my mother had refused to buy him an overpriced souvenir a few hours earlier, but I doubt it. I saw something close to fear in his eyes as he looked at the KKK uniforms hung as casually as one would hang their jacket in a closet. The dirty white of the canvas contrasted with the black walls that made up the museum. Something about seeing the cloth in person and being close enough to touch it made my voice catch in my throat.

Back in the hot tub, Hudson formulates his response. He says, “Well, why did we take all their land then? It sucks.” This is probably the same thing he was thinking about when we were in Kura Hulanda. Why did we take these people’s lives? It sucks. These are questions I don’t have an answer for, leaving Hudson with the image of a black man hooked through the ribs and strung up on a tree like a slaughtered pig, or children his age shackled together by their necks. But I think it is my lack of answers for him that frustrates him the most. But for now, he lets the jets of the hot tub puff up his swimming trunks with air, and he floats away.