I found out through a tweet that my favourite travel guide company was having a travel writing competition, and that entries were due in 24 hours. Even though I was (very) late, I had a spark of inspiration and wrote something that day. The theme was “beneath the surface” and the shortlisted entries were just announced today. Even though my story didn’t get selected as a finalist I still think it’s not half bad and I thought I’d post it here anyway.
Walking under Memphis
Although I was humming its most famous tune, I was not in Memphis to see any of its most famous sights. I was here to see the inside of a lizard’s brain.
I had never been to Memphis before, and as I was making my way through the airport I couldn’t get “Walking in Memphis” out of my head. I have always loved the song, and this was the first time I could sing it to myself while actually walking in Memphis. For weeks I had been anticipating my trip to this city steeped in American mythology, on the banks of America’s grandest river, the Mississippi. I was curious about Memphis’s famous attractions: Bourbon Street, Graceland, The Pyramid. But mostly I was eager to slice open the brain of a lizard and peer down at what was inside.
The following morning I arrived bright and early at Memphis’s Rhodes College and was immediately struck by the beauty of the campus. Its Old Gothic sandstone buildings are impressively imposing and give the campus an air of intellectual gravity – which I suspect was the architect’s intention. The fact that it was still only March meant that the trees were bare and the grass was dead, giving me a sense of quiet foreboding that was not helped by the fact the campus was deserted, it not yet being 7am. This was the only time my busy host, a Rhodes professor, had available to meet with me, so I hurried through the campus.
A sandstone wall at Rhodes College, Memphis Tennessee
I was stopped dead in my tracks when I arrived at my host’s building, or, rather, the location where his building should have been. What I found was not a beautiful structure made of multicolour sandstone, but an empty courtyard.
The courtyard where the building I was looking for should have been.
I searched the courtyard’s perimeter and found a non-descript set of damp concrete stairs that lead underground before ending abruptly at a concrete wall. As I descended the steps I noticed a door to the right, without any indication as to where it might lead.
The nondescript concrete steps leading underground.
To my surprise the door was unlocked, and opening it revealed a poorly-lit, cavernous hallway. In display cases along the walls taxidermied animals stared at me through their glassy eyes, but otherwise it was completely deserted. I wandered the halls, my footsteps making uncomfortably loud echoes, searching darkened offices and research labs for signs of life. Eventually I noticed one lab with a light on, and to my relief found my host.
I had ventured into this underground lair of a research facility to learn a new technique for studying the brains of lizards, which I use to learn about how evolution shapes brains through natural selection. The professor I was visiting is one of the world’s foremost experts on the topic. The technique is called immunohistochemistry and uses extracts from the blood of animals, in this case goats, donkeys, and rabbits, to study how certain proteins are distributed inside a brain. It’s rather like attending a one-day cooking class to learn a new cooking technique, except the ingredients are closer to the components of a witch’s brew than a crème brûlée.
I spent that day in the underground laboratory learning how to carefully slice lizard brain tissue, combine the slices with solutions derived from the blood of animals, stir the mixture thoroughly, and then mount the slices carefully on microscope slides. It felt appropriate to be learning this in a lair under a city famous for Hoodoo mysticism. Of course at the end of the process we did not consume our concoction, but rather examined the brain slices under a microscope. And instead of reciting incantations we discussed how to identify brain cells that produce the neurotransmitters oxytocin and vasopressin. In my mind, the whole experience emphasized how much modern science can have the feel of witchcraft when you take a step back.
Some slices from the brain of a lizard incubating in a solution derived from rabbit and donkey blood.
My host, the lizard brain expert, found nothing particularly unusual about his lab, only lamenting the lack of windows. But as I was leaving campus that evening, I was thinking about how a large scientific research facility was present on this campus yet almost completely undetectable, and I wondered what else an old, mystic city like Memphis might be hiding below its surface.