An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) (40 page)

Normal children use clay for modelling; I used my feces and then spread my creations all over the room. I chewed up puzzles and spit the cardboard mush out on the floor. I had a violent temper, and when thwarted, I’d throw anything handy—a museum quality vase or leftover feces. I screamed continually—

And yet, like many autistic children, she soon developed an immense power of concentration, a selectivity of attention so intense that it could create a world of its own, a place of calm and order in the chaos and tumult: “I could sit on the beach for hours dribbling sand through my fingers and fashioning miniature mountains”, she writes. “Each particle of sand intrigued me as though I were a scientist looking through a microscope. Other times I scrutinized each line in my finger, following one as if it were a road on a map.” Or she would spin, or spin a coin, so raptly that she saw and heard nothing else. “People around me were transparent—Even a sudden loud noise didn’t startle me from my world.” (It is not clear whether this hyperfocus of attention—an attention as narrow as it is intense—is a primary phenomenon in autism or a reaction or adaptation to an overwhelming, uninhibited barrage of sensation. A similar hyperfocus is sometimes seen in Tourette’s syndrome.)

At three, Temple was taken to a neurologist, and the diagnosis of autism was made; it was hinted that lifelong institutionalization would probably be necessary. The total absence of speech at this age seemed especially ominous.

How, I had to wonder, had she ever moved from this almost unintelligible childhood, with its chaos, its fixations, its inaccessibility, its violence—this fierce and desperate state, which had almost led to her institutionalization at the age of three—to the successful biologist and engineer I was going to see?

I phoned Temple from the Denver airport to reconfirm our meeting—it was conceivable, I thought, that she might be somewhat inflexible about arrangements, so time and place should be set as definitely as possible. It was an hour-and-a-quarter drive to Fort Collins, Temple said, and she provided minute directions for finding her office at Colorado State University, where she is an assistant professor in the Animal Sciences Department. At one point, I missed a detail, and asked Temple to repeat it, and was startled when she repeated the entire directional litany—several minutes’ worth—in virtually the same words. It seemed as if the directions had to be given as they were held in Temple’s mind, entire—that they had I used into a fixed association or program and could no longer be separated into their components. One instruction, however, had to be modified. She had told me at first that I should turn right onto College Street at a particular intersection marked by a Taco Bell restaurant. In her second set of directions, Temple added an aside here, said the Taco Bell had recently had a face-lift and been housed in a fake cottage, and no longer looked in the least “bellish.” I was struck by the charming, whimsical adjective “bellish”—autistic people are often called humorless, unimaginative, and “bellish” was surely an original concoction, a spontaneous and delightful image.

I made my way to the university campus and located the Animal Sciences Building, where Temple was waiting to greet me. She is a tall, strongly built woman in her midforties; she was wearing jeans, a knit shirt, western boots, her habitual dress. Her clothing, her appearance, her manner, were plain, frank, and forthright; I had the impression of a sturdy, no-nonsense cattlewoman, with an indifference to social conventions, appearance, or ornament, an absence of frills, an absolute directness of manner and mind. When she raised her arm in greeting, the arm went too high, seemed to get caught for a moment in a sort of spasm or fixed posture—a hint, an echo, of the stereotypes she once had. Then she gave me a strong handshake and led the way down to her office. (Her gait seemed to me slightly clumsy or uncouth, as is often the case with autistic adults. Temple attributes this to a simple ataxia associated with impaired development of the vestibular system and part of the cerebellum. Later I did a brief neurological exam, focusing on her cerebellar function and balance; I did indeed find a little ataxia, but insufficient, I thought, to explain her odd gait.)

She sat me down with little ceremony, no preliminaries, no social niceties, no small talk about my trip or how I liked Colorado. Her office, crowded with papers, with work done and to do, could have been that of any academic, with photographs of her projects on the wall and animal knickknacks she had picked up on her travels. She plunged straight into talking of her work, speaking of her early interests in psychology and animal behavior, how they were connected with self-observation and a sense of her own needs as an autistic person, and how this had joined with the visualizing and engineering part of her mind to point her toward the special field she had made her own: the design of farms, feedlots, corrals, slaughterhouses-systems of many sorts for animal management.

She handed me a book containing some of the layouts she had developed over the years—the book was titled Beef Cattle Behaviors, Handling, and Facilities Design—and I admired the complex and beautiful designs inside, and the logical presentation of the book, starting with diagrams of cattle and sheep and hog behavior and moving through designs of corrals to ever more complex ranch and feedlot facilities.

She spoke well and clearly, but with a certain unstoppable impetus and fixity. A sentence, a paragraph, once started, had to be completed; nothing was left implicit, hanging in the air.

I was feeling somewhat exhausted, hungry, and thirsty—I had been traveling all day and had missed lunch—and I kept hoping Temple would notice and offer me some coffee. She did not; so, after an hour, almost fainting under the barrage of her overexplicit and relentless sentences, and the need to attend to several things at once (not only what she was saying, which was often complex and unfamiliar, but also her mental processes, the sort of person she was), I finally asked for some coffee. There was no “I’m sorry, I should have offered you some before”, no intermediacy, no social junction. Instead, she immediately took me to a coffeepot that was kept brewing in the secretaries’ office upstairs. She introduced me to the secretaries in a somewhat brusque manner, giving me the feeling, once again, of someone who had learned, roughly, “how to behave” in such situations without having much personal perception of how other people felt—the nuances, the social subtleties, involved.

“Time to get some dinner, ” Temple suddenly announced after we had spent another hour in her office. “We eat early in the West.” We went to a nearby western restaurant, one with swinging doors and with guns and cattle horns on the walls—it was already crowded, as Temple had said it would be, at five in the afternoon—and we ordered a classic western meal of ribs and beer. We ate heartily and talked throughout the meal about the technical aspects of Temple’s work and the ways in which she sets out every design, every problem, visually, in her mind. As we left the restaurant, I suggested we go for a walk, and Temple took me out to a meadow along an old railway line. The day was cooling rapidly—we were at five thousand feet—and in the long evening light gnats darned the air and crickets were stridulating all around us. I found some horsetails (one of my favorite plants) in a muddy patch below the tracks and became excited about them. Temple glanced at them, said “Equisetum”, but did not seem stirred by them, as I was.

On the plane to Denver, I had been reading a remarkable piece of writing by a highly gifted, normal nine-year-old—a fairy story she had created, with a wonderful sense of myth, a whole world of magic, animism, and cosmogonies. What, I wondered as we walked through the horsetails, of Temple’s cosmogony? How did she respond to myths, or to dramas? How much did they carry meaning for her? I asked her about the Greek myths. She said that she had read many of them as a child, and that she thought of Icarus in particular—how he had flown too near the sun and his wings had melted and he had plummeted to his death. “I understand Nemesis and Hubris”, she said. But the loves of the gods, I ascertained, left her unmoved—and puzzled. It was similar with Shakespeare’s plays. She was bewildered, she said, by Romeo and Juliet (“I never knew what they were up to”), and with Hamlet she got lost with the back-and-forth of the play. Though she ascribed these problems to “sequencing difficulties”, they seemed to arise from her failure to empathize with the characters, to follow the intricate play of motive and intention. She said that she could understand “simple, strong, universal” emotions but was stumped by more complex emotions and the games people play. “Much of the time”, she said, “I feel like an anthropologist on Mars.”

She was at pains to keep her own life simple, she said, and to make everything very clear and explicit. She had built up a vast library of experiences over the years, she went on. They were like a library of videotapes, which she could play in her mind and inspect at any time—“videos” of how people behaved in different circumstances. She would play these over and over again and learn, by degrees, to correlate what she saw, so that she could then predict how people in similar circumstances might act. She had complemented her experience by constant reading, including reading of trade journals and the Wall Street Journal—all of which enlarged her knowledge of the species. “It is strictly a logical process”, she explained.

In one plant she had designed, she said, there had been repeated breakdowns of the machinery, but these occurred only when a particular man, John, was in the room. She “correlated” these incidents and inferred at last that John must be sabotaging the equipment. “I had to learn to be suspicious, I had to learn it cognitively. I could put two and two together, but I couldn’t see the jealous look on his face.” Such incidents have not been uncommon in her life: “It bends some people out of shape that this autistic weirdo can come in and design all the equipment. They want the equipment, but it galls them that they can’t do it themselves, but that Tom”—an engineering colleague—“and I can, that we’ve got hundred-thousand-dollar Sun workstations in our heads.” In her ingenuousness and gullibility, Temple was at first a target for all sorts of tricks and exploitations; this sort of innocence or guilelessness, arising not from moral virtue but from failure to understand dissembling and pretense (“the dirty devices of the world”, in Traherne’s phrase), is almost universal among the autistic. But over the years Temple has learned, in her indirect way, by inspecting her “library”, some of the ways of the world. She has, in fact, been able to found her own company and to work as a freelance consultant to and designer of animal facilities all over the world. By professional standards, she is extraordinarily successful, but other human interactions—social, sexual—she cannot “get.” “My work is my life”, she told me several times. “There is not that much else.”

There seemed to me pain, renunciation, resolution, and acceptance all mixed together in her voice, and these are the feelings that sound through her writings. In one article she writes:

I do not fit in with the social life of my town or university. Almost all of my social contacts are with livestock people or people interested in autism. Most of my Friday and Saturday nights are spent writing papers and drawing. My interests are factual and my recreational reading consists mostly of science and livestock publications. I have little interest in novels with complicated interpersonal relationships, because I am unable to remember the sequence of events. Detailed descriptions of new technologies in science fiction or descriptions of exotic places are much more interesting. My life would be horrible if I did not have my challenging career.

Early the next morning, a Saturday, Temple picked me up in her four-wheel-drive, a rugged vehicle she drives all over the West to visit farms, ranches, corrals, and meat plants. As we headed for her house, I quizzed her about the work she had done for her Ph.D.; her thesis was on the effects of enriched and impoverished environments on the development of pigs’ brains. She told me about the great differences that developed between the two groups—how sociable and delightful the “enriched” pigs became, how hyperexcitable and aggressive (and almost “autistic”) the “impoverished” ones were by contrast. (She wondered whether impoverishment of experience was not a contributing factor in human autism.) “I got to love my enriched pigs”, she said. “I was very attached. I was so attached I couldn’t kill them.” The animals had to be sacrificed at the end of the experiment so their brains could be examined. She described how the pigs, at the end, trusting her, let her lead them on their last walk, and how she had calmed them, by stroking them and talking to them, while they were killed. She was very distressed at their deaths—“I wept and wept.”

She had just finished the story when we arrived at her borne—a small two-story town house, some distance from the campus. Downstairs was comfortable, with the usual amenities—a sofa, armchairs, a television, pictures on the wall—but I had the sense that it was rarely used. There was an immense sepia print of her grandfather’s farm in Grandin, North Dakota, in 1880; her other grandfather, she told me, had invented the automatic pilot for planes. These two were the progenitors, she feels, of her agricultural and engineering talents. Upstairs was her study, with her typewriter (but no word processor), absolutely bursting with manuscripts and books—books everywhere, spilling out of the study into every room in the house. (My own little house was once described as “a machine for working”, and I had a somewhat similar impression of Temple’s.) On one wall was a large cowhide with a huge collection of identity badges and caps, from the hundreds of conferences she has lectured at. I was amused to see, side by side, an I.D. from the American Meat Institute and one from the American Psychiatric Association. Temple has published more than a hundred papers, divided between those on animal behavior and facilities management and those on autism. The intimate blending of the two was epitomized by the medley of badges side by side.