See the Squirrels, Find the Nuts

The best travel companies feature elaborate tours to exotic destinations. These deluxe tours have glossy brochures and Web sites offering the allure of a James Bond adventure even for those who aren’t secret agents. The tours are exotic, but they all follow a careful script. You’re supposed to do this and see that, in a particular sequence, during certain times. The vacation may be experienced with a degree of elegance and panache not usually experienced in real life, but it is all preplanned. When you get to the scenic photo lookout, you’re supposed to gasp and take a picture.

Yet when we visited the Grand Canyon when my children were younger, the one thing the kids remembered was a colony of squirrels. The Grand Canyon features maybe the mother-of-all scenic overlook moments. Most people have expectations of what they will see, having looked at pictures and read descriptions about the Grand Canyon before actually going there. We were mentally prepared for the big moment, the first view looking over the edge of the precipice. We gingerly approached the National Park entrance from the south, which was not much of a Grand Canyon experience at all, since it was cluttered with motels and fast food restaurants. The National Park boundary is about ten miles or so from the rim of the canyon. Once inside the hallowed park gates, the government took over, and the scenery was transformed to a carefully preserved layout of high Western woods, without motels. The next fifteen minutes were a tease, as we drove north on the high volcanic plateau approaching the rim. There was no hint of what was about to come.

Then we reached the first turnout and walked over to the edge of the abyss. All of ten billion years of history was geologically mapped before us, in blazing desert light on the shear canyon cliffs. Falcons cried and soared in hot air currents just over the rim. The tiny ribbon far below was the raging Colorado River. Light reflected and glowed off the odd angles and shapes of the canyon walls, adding a sense of mystery to the colorful rocks. As we watched, unworldly patterns of colors and shadows shifted. It really was a spectacle, everything we imagined it would be, and we had imagined a lot.

The kids watched for about ten seconds. Then they shrugged and found the squirrels. A colony of desert squirrels had set up shop in the nooks and crannies beyond the rock wall at the canyon edge. Over the years, the squirrels had become accustomed to National Park life. They had become domesticated. My kids took turns feeding them popcorn and trying to get them to perform tricks. The squirrels were happy to participate, and this interaction went on for a good forty-five minutes or so. As Dan and Rachel played with the squirrels, the Colorado River flowed thousands of feet below in its awesome march through the sands of time. Destiny, mortality, and the full weight of prerecorded history were there in an awesome display. If you listened closely, you could hear a concert orchestra playing a sublime, mystical desert concerto, with prominent violin riffs. But the kids were perfectly content to ignore the spectacle and play with the squirrels. Therein lies a good lesson for the adults—if you can see the squirrels, you can find the nuts.

We live in the present, in a sequence of moments. A moment that hasn’t arrived yet is in the future, and one that has passed is in the past. I think that engineers are trained not to be spontaneous. Our education and way of thinking is based on the idea of building things step by step to arrive at the future. We are a sequential, linear group. To design and build a bridge, you don’t just have the thought and experience of “bridge” at that moment, and then it becomes a bridge. You have to conceptualize it, and then concept-design it, and then analyze it, and then draw it, all of that before a footing is poured or a beam is placed. The structure, itself, requires a rigorous sequence to be built properly. The piers have to be built before the spans, and the footings and piles before the piers. There is some limited variation in the sequence, but the overall concept is pretty rigid.

So we engineers plan every day for the future. At the same time, we are haunted by the past. Our methods and approaches are developed and refined largely based on what went wrong before we even begin. Our suspension bridge designs have deep stiffening trusses or airfoil deck shapes to avoid the fate of the first Tacoma Narrows Bridge. You can see the reflections of the past in the present designs of the second and third Tacoma Narrows Bridges. Structural engineers, in a sense, relive every past earthquake by updating the analysis approach to account for new ground motions that weren’t known before. The tragedy of the Hyatt Hotel in Kansas City has become a cautionary tale that is studied to glean knowledge of how organizations can fail.

Our great engineering ability to build for the future, and respect and worry about the past, is part of the process leading to the amazing projects that we may take for granted, but in fact are actually miraculous. The whole built form and infrastructure of human civilization exists thanks to us, the engineers. Lawyers or actors (no offense, they are very nice people also) don’t build squat.

But in embracing the engineering process, I think we personally end up paying a price. We don’t see the squirrels, and so sometimes we don’t find the nuts. Before arriving at the rim of the Grand Canyon, I had planned for an experience of awe. When the moment arrived, the actual experience was very different. It was a kid-moment playing with squirrels, and a terrific one at that, but it wasn’t what I had carefully planned for. My engineering nature rebelled against the idea of enjoying the kids’ interaction with the squirrels, because to do so, I would have to scrap the plans and specs that dictated Grand Canyon shock and awe.

So I think we engineers don’t appreciate the present moments as much, because the prize is always on the horizon. Probably actors learn to appreciate the present moment very much, and thus fully experience it. They have no choice. The present is it for them, no contract drawing deliverables ten months in the future. To be a successful actor, I suspect you really have to inhabit and live in the present.

Engineers should not end up behaving as lawyers or actors (no offense, they are very nice people also), in the sense that we probably have a greater ability of reflection and perspective that comes from planning deeply for the future and worrying continuously about the past. But it is in our interest and of value to remember and appreciate the majesty and grandeur of what we’re doing while we’re doing it. In other words, sometimes at work we should also live in the present. Sometimes we need to step back from the process and think about the act of creation that we are actively participating in. Since the engineering and construction process is often tedious, this is not such a bad idea.

Today, if you asked Rachel and Dan about what they remembered from our trips to Arizona, they would tell you three things. One was the story about feeding the squirrels. The second was about when we went horseback riding in Monument Valley. Unlike at more controlled, touristy destinations, our Native American guides let us gallop at full speed, and little Rachel got to ride on her own horse in and around the buttes. There was no script here, just a bunch of cowboys (and girls) galloping in the desert off to the setting sun.

The third event, maybe even better than the squirrels and horseback riding, was also the least expected and planned. We had rented a beautiful, rustic cabin in Sedona. The cabin was just east of town in a quiet canyon next to a babbling brook. The cabin was rustic, but not too rustic in that it had complete kitchen facilities, and we stocked the fridge with some staples for the week. On our last morning there, pretty much everything had been eaten, except for a big vat of vanilla ice cream. It seemed like a shame to let that go to waste, so the kids and I sat on the front porch with the vat and three spoons. For the next few minutes, we quietly feasted on ice cream for breakfast. In that lazy scenic canyon, the brook babbled, and time stood still.

Ice cream with chocolate syrup is usually not what’s for breakfast. I must have turned off my inner-engineer that morning.