Save Your Applause For The Scientists

I admit it. I’m as guilty as anyone else when it comes to admiring top sports teams and appreciating the skills of world-ranked athletes.

I love seeing them work together as a team to win championships or close games. And I enjoy watching individual professional athletes perform extraordinary feats.

Certainly, as a sportswriter for more than 20 years, I have seen my fair share of record-breaking performances, met some exceptional athletes and seen history made in athletics that will forever be on instant replay in my mind.

But in recent years, I’ve met some new superstars who work in virtual anonymity and deserve far more attention than any of them would ever want. Their names are not well known and they don’t reap lucrative benefits for the long hours of plying their craft even though they are among the world’s best. There’s no confetti, headlines or applause from thousands of adoring fans for these people.

In fact, most of the time when they perform their best work, they are alone, dirty, bloody and in environments where even their best friends might decline to go. Their incentive is not fame and fortune, but rather, an intrinsic curiosity to answer questions, solve problems, and detail those findings in documents that can be used by others.

Who are these people? They are scientists.

And these scientists are everyday people who are committed to research often involving specific species and specific habitats. They regularly deal with evolving changes that affect the living organisms they study and they are unabashedly passionate about the focus of their studies. Their fist pumps are cerebral, at most.

For example, I recently reached out to the scientists at the Smithsonian Marine Station in Fort Pierce, Fla., to inquire about a blue land crab (cardisoma guanhumi) that was showing up in my neighborhood in Central Florida. Scientist Sherry Reed kindly responded and informed me that Hurricane Irma had spawned a migration of these crabs as they move from salt marshes to the ocean at this time of year.

Reed provided the information I wanted, and in a follow-up email, she called these crabs “beautiful creatures” (they are!) and admitted they were “especially near and dear to [her] heart.”

That kind of passion for a species and commitment to understand their existence is exactly why I believe we should thoughtfully consider who our real heroes are -- and why.

Scientists most often specialize in a focus area and spend countless hours and years documenting their species. Both when things go right and when things go wrong, they still seek answers to questions.

How many times have I listened to Lori Morris of St. Johns River Water Management District passionately discuss the importance of seagrass in the Indian River Lagoon? And when an algal bloom in 2011 killed 47,000 acres of precious seagrass in the estuary, why was I not surprised that Morris was out in the water with other scientists, hand-planting grasses and later snorkeling to monitor its progress?

How can I not get excited about oysters and shoreline restoration when Dr. Linda Walters of the University of Central Florida starts talking about the work she has done with oyster-shell recycling for nearly two decades? If you ever work with her on one of these shoreline projects, it’s like spending a day with the Johnny Appleseed of oysters.

I’ve also logged time on the water with Wendy Noke of Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute looking for sick and injured dolphins. I’ve watched Wendy suspend her great affinity for specific animals she had monitored for years when it came time to perform necropsies to determine what had killed them. A few years ago, when a deadly virus swept the offshore dolphin population, I knew I could find Wendy with a scalpel in her gloved hands, harvesting tissue for pathology results – sometimes twice a day. Maybe even Wendy wanted to cry at the loss of so many magnificent animals, but there was too much work to be done in the name of science.

If you want to get excited about sharks, listen to George Burgess talk about his favorite species. Burgess is the director of the Florida Program for Shark Research at the Florida Museum of Natural History in Gainesville, Fla. He has spent his career following these animals and documenting their behaviors and statistics. He can tell you where not to swim in New Smyrna Beach, based on shark-bite statistics and baitfish prevalence, but he can also espouse the miracles and mysteries of these animals from a lifetime of research.

A few times, I’ve had the privilege of walking at the elbow of Dr. Jane Brockmann, a professor emeritus at the University of Florida, who has studied horseshoe crabs for more than 30 years. Once I was with Dr. Brockmann when we found spawning horseshoe crabs on an atypical shoreline. These animals are thought to have been in existence for more than 445 million years, so to observe the surprise and delight of a veteran scientist who was seeing something new after three decades of study was better than witnessing a half-court buzzer beater.

Sometimes I have dinner with another professor, Dr. Hyun Jung Cho, who teaches integrated environmental science at Bethune-Cookman University, and I find myself marveling at her commitment to study wetlands and aquatic vegetation at all times – even if she’s wearing a dress on her way home from church and happens to spy a retention pond with interesting grasses. “That’s why I keep rubber boots in my car,” she said matter-of-factly, when I asked if she really waded into these ponds in her Sunday clothes.

Research ecologist Gina Kent, of the Avian Research and Conservation Institute, monitors the nesting habits, migratory patterns and the habitat challenges of swallow-tailed kites. When these magnificent raptors return to Central Florida from South America to nest each year, Gina is collecting data. And with the information I have learned from her and shared with others who live where these birds nest, now my previously uninterested friends are excitedly offering regular reports to me about “those birds with the interesting tail feathers.”

Even away from the institutes and universities, the scientists among us help shine a spotlight on our world and its living organisms that really should be valued and cherished more than any homerun, slam-dunk, 60-yard field goal or ace in the hole.

Michael Brothers, of the Marine Science Center in Ponce Inlet, Fla., for example, can look at a gathering of 10,000 seagulls on a beach and identify several different species with one quick glance. Chad Truxall of the Marine Discovery Center in New Smyrna Beach, Fla., can lead a group to a sandbar and suddenly unveil a host of creatures just under the soil’s surface that could otherwise easily be overlooked.

Maybe I’m slowing down as I round the bases in life, but I can “see the pitches” better than ever. These scientists clearly demonstrate skill, knowledge, experience, commitment and passion – asking for nothing and giving everything they have every single time they perform.

That’s why I say, if you want to applaud someone for a genuine superstar performance, save it for our scientists. They do their excellent work for the species they study, but more importantly, for the roles their species play in the world.

Scientists are looking at history, the present and the future with the hope their respective work can help us better understand our world and what we can do to assure a viable planet.

And the passion they show for their work is contagious – kind of like that wave that starts in a stadium and brings true fans to their feet.

- Lisa D. Mickey, Oct. 8, 2017

Goodbye Yuku Tanaka, My Sensei, My Friend

I met Yuku on a one-mile boardwalk loop called Cranes Roost Park in the early 1990s when I lived in Altamonte Springs, Fla. We were both runners and it always seemed that we ran in opposite directions. We would pass each other and wave, usually six times each morning.

I didn’t know her name and I didn’t know she was nearly 30 years older than me. I just knew she was a determined little Japanese woman who could put down the mileage and never change expression.

Eventually, I bumped into her at an Orlando road race. She said, “I’m Yuku. I see you at Cranes Roost.” The next race I saw her and she asked if I would like to join her for lunch with the Japanese runners who were visiting from Urayasu – Orlando’s sister city.

I had no idea what I was getting into because those Japanese runners wanted to go to HOOTERS! So I sat there eating chicken wings and watching jetlagged Japanese male runners stare at Hooters waitresses as they pounded down beer. Yuku just giggled and told me, “Japanese people, they crazy.”

Yuku and I would go on to run a lot of road races together throughout the years. She was in her mid-60s and I was in my mid-30s. We didn’t run the same times, but she would usually win her age group, and if I was lucky, I might finish in the top-10 of mine. But she always won trophies, and when we carpooled to races, we had to hang around to the end so she could pick up her prizes. Yuku was among running royalty in Orlando.

If we weren’t running road races, we had another Saturday ritual. I would pick her up at her house and we would go to the Winter Park Farmer’s Market, then go to lunch at some new restaurant she had read about in the newspaper, stop by Track Shack, our favorite Orlando running store, and end the day with a visit to Dong A, a rambling Asian grocery store loaded with exotic foods and goods from throughout Asia.

Often, Yuku would pick up groceries at Dong A and cook for me later in the week. I fell in love with her traditional Japanese cooking with such dishes as chirashi (a tossed sushi), hijiki (a seaweed), goma-ae (spinach), spicy gobo (burdock root), miso soup, mochi (pounded rice) and yosenabe (a type of hot-pot soup).

She would tell me stories of how “the mochi men” came to her family’s home when she was a child to pound rice with wooden mallets into a sticky glutinous brick, which was an important food during the Japanese New Year’s celebration. She would also make “rice ball” for me, showing me how to hold the formed rice in her fingers just so, and how the sushi rice needed the right amount of sweet and rice vinegar. She said she made her rice like her mother and that everybody’s rice in Japan was unique to the family’s taste.

We both loved Thai food and once, we ordered a spicy whole fish at a local restaurant for lunch. The dish was so spicy I felt like my inner ear was sweating, but we picked one side of the fish clean, then flipped it over and with our chopsticks, polished off the other side. As we sat there staring at the skeleton of the fish we had just woofed down and dabbing our faces with paper napkins, Yuku laughed and said, “Looks like raccoons were here.” Yes, and they had chopsticks.

I eventually got a job with another magazine and moved to Connecticut. I kept in touch with Yuku and visited when I could get to the Orlando area several times a year. Whenever I did, Yuku loaded up my bags with homegrown pumelo from her fruit trees and homemade inari sushi – my favorite.

She was diagnosed with cancer while I was in Connecticut and had a kidney removed. She also underwent chemotherapy, so I teased her and said her hair would come back blonde or curly. She just laughed.

After her treatments were over, she telephoned one day and said she had decided to run a marathon for the first time. She was now 77. I told her if her doctor said she could do it, we could enroll her in a marathon-training program and then I would run a marathon with her. She did, and we ran the New York City Marathon together in 1998. I had already run that race two previous times, so I knew this would be her race and our celebration that cancer was gone. We would start together and finish together.

Yuku was determined and she ran well, but she got tired late in the race. I encouraged her, walking with her when she needed to slow down, and picking it up again after water stops. Nearing mile 26, Yuku said she didn’t think she could finish. “Yuku, you didn’t beat cancer to quit now, and you didn’t do all that training in the Florida heat to fly up here and not get across the finish line. So let’s go!” I said. I grabbed her little arm and off we went -- Yuku smiling at the finish line and later, staring at the finisher’s medal hanging around her neck.

She went on to run more marathons and when the Japanese runners came from Urayasu to run the Disney Marathon, Yuku and I would usually meet up with them for a meal before the race and then go with them for Chinese dim sum (dumplings) after the race. Most of the time, I had no clue what was being said, but it’s amazing how you can share a meal together and language barriers don’t matter. Good is good, no matter which language you speak.

I ran the Disney Marathon eight times, always starting with my friend Yuku. I remember seeing her in the race and yelling for her. I also remember seeing some of the Japanese runners who drank beer the night before the race struggling on the course. I yelled out to one, “Mr. Kobayashi, drink water, not beer!” He laughed and waved.

Later that day, as we entertained the Urayasu runners over dim sum at Orlando’s Ming Court, I watched a tired and still-jetlagged Mr. Kobayashi’s head sink closer and closer to his plate. He eventually went to his rental car and fell fast asleep in the parking lot. Yuku just laughed and once again uttered her favorite expression: “Japanese people, they crazy.”

Time passed and we shared many more episodes of joy and despair. She was so happy when I was finally able to travel to Japan on business. She was thrilled when I brought her fresh plum mochi from the city I had visited and she listened intently when I described how elderly women were the ones who dove into the deep, dark water for the cultured Mikimoto pearls.

But there were also dark days. Yuku’s husband died after his own battle with cancer. Then her house was severely damaged when the 2004 hurricanes ripped off her roof and she was forced to move into a hotel for nine months while her home was rebuilt. Her son also died and she went into self-imposed isolation for about a year. And then thieves stole her car from the driveway and took it for a joy ride.

Her late husband’s best friend Hank also got sick on a Thanksgiving morning when Hank and Yuku were planning to drive over to the beach where I live and join me for the holiday meal. Instead, Yuku and I spent Thanksgiving in a hospital emergency waiting room. The surgeon eventually emerged, telling us Hank had colon cancer and had just undergone major surgery.

In spite of so many bumps in the road, Yuku stayed active and determined. She walked road races into her 80s, went to the JCC in Maitland for “Silver Sneakers” senior workouts, loved to go out to lunch, read the Orlando Sentinel every morning, showed off new cookbooks every time I visited, and could tell you every point of tennis matches she had watched on the Tennis Channel.

But then the cancer returned. It was discovered a few years ago when Yuku fell and broke both wrists while running. As doctors tried to determine why she was stumbling and falling, a tumor was discovered in her brain. Again, she underwent treatment, including radiation. And again, Yuku appeared resilient, rallying as she had done so many times before.

This time, however, the tumor was growing rapidly. Yuku’s once remarkable balance and grit were now being usurped by the mass in her brain. This tumor didn’t care what she had already been through in life. It didn’t care that she had done more in 86 years than most people could even imagine.

This was the woman who once told me she had seen bombers fly into her Japanese city many years ago, and how the citizens would hide under cars or whatever they could find when they heard the roar of the incoming planes. The American bombers were “so close, you could see their eyes,” she said. She remembered the bombing of Nagasaki in 1945, and the pain of war.

But Yuku would go on to marry an American sailor and move to the United States. She would follow him around America, learning English and learning American ways. She was with her husband in 1964 when they were based in Alaska and a magnitude 9.2 earthquake shook the Alaskan coastline. With a resulting massive tsunami on its way, Yuku hurriedly took her cat and a bag of rice and headed for the top of mountain to wait out the destruction that would ultimately kill 119 people.

Even for a woman who lived through war, natural disasters, loss of loved ones and property -- and sometimes, social acceptance because of her heritage -- my friend Yuku showed me an unparalled tenacity. As the tumor pressed against her brain, she struggled to find words during my visit to her hospital room in December 2016.

She looked weak and tiny. She was confused. She was tired. She looked at me and said, “What can you do? Sometimes it just is.”

In her final days, Yuku didn’t recognize her friends anymore and her family was half a world away. Now, she spoke only Japanese. She also crawled deep into a place so distant that she was gone before any of us knew it. Her long race had finally come to the home stretch.

Years ago, Yuku asked me if I would take her ashes back to her home in Kyushu Island to the Tanaka family cemetery. That request seemed so far away at the time. I viewed her as a runner who only saw the road before her and feared nothing.

But now, it is here, and when the time is right, I will take Yuku home to Kyushu. I’ll do it both with great sadness for the loss of my friend, but also with tremendous gratitude for all she has taught me.

Arigato, Yuku-san. Domo arigato.

- Lisa D. Mickey, March 5, 2017