Geiger Counter

I remember seeing a trailer 11 years ago for a movie called “The Tooth Fairy.” It was a film in which a wrestler called The Rock played an aging and jaded hockey player who went by the nickname, “The Tooth Fairy” because he knocked out so many players’ teeth. At some point, he convinces a young child not to believe in miracles and is therefore punished by the gods and forced to work as an actual tooth fairy, collecting incisors from under various pillows.  It looked horrendous.  “Can you imagine?!” I said to my wife at the time. “Can you imagine spending two hours watching that?!!” The premise seemed like the laconic fever dream of a chronically uninspired writer who harbored deep contempt for the audience. It was begging for a sequel in which retired NBA superstar Karl “The Mailman” Malone was forced to put on a blue postal uniform and deliver Amazon packages because he told a kid that letter writing was a dead art.  We laughed at how inane the general populace must be for watching such drivel, then went back to whatever we were doing in 2010.  I watched “The Tooth Fairy” last night.  It was the exact same movie I assumed it was back then, but with one significant change: This time it was being watched by my seven-year-old daughter. The writing was no more inspired than it was all those years ago, but it’s hard to hate on something that’s making the child next to you on the couch giggle and squeal with delight. I would not recommend “The Tooth Fairy” for anyone who does not have a first grader viewing it with them, and I would strongly recommend beer no matter who your viewing companion is. But the universe and the film nonetheless made their point: We change, and the way we experience things changes with us. Every day, depending on what we have learned and who we are with, creation reveals itself to us in dynamic ways. The way we experience things seems to change the very things themselves, because we are inexorably linked to the world around us. I remember hearing (I have no idea if it is true) that J.M. Barrie filled half the theater with young children from a local orphanage on the night Peter Pan first opened. By seating fusty adults next to delighted children capable of awe and wonder, he was able to change the way everyone saw his play about a young boy who can never grow old.  It is our eyes that tell us about the place we inhabit, but of course they are one of the very first things to vanish once we are dead. Within mere seconds they cease to glimmer, and within days or weeks they are reduced to gelatinous mush.  The teeth, however, often remain for thousands of years after everything else has seeped back into the earth.  I wrote a couple years ago about the Egtved Girl, who was buried on a summer day in 1370 BC. She was between 16 and 18 years old, and she was laid to rest in an oak coffin and covered by a barrow near Storehøj in modern-day Denmark. When she was discovered 100 years ago, only her teeth, hair, brain, nails and a little skin remained, along with her clothing and the cremated ashes of a young child, possibly hers, in a small box alongside her. There was also a cup that had contained beer.  For several years, scientists were sure this young girl had walked back and forth between the Black Forest and Scandinavia, an astonishing journey to take on foot during the Bronze Age. They figured it out by examining strontium isotopes in her teeth, which they thought could tell them where she had been and what she had eaten and drank during her youth. More recently, other scientists have challenged the theory, saying the isotopes could come from any number of places, and they don’t prove she walked to Germany and back again, or vice versa. Both sides claim to know, but neither does.  Wherever she sourced her strontium, she remains stunning simply because she existed, so very long ago, and managed through her clothing and teeth and coffin to tell us a story more than 3,000 years later.  It turns out, researchers spend an awful lot of time looking at teeth. For while our thoughts and words often dissipate when we die, the things we grind our food with stick around for ages. Just this summer, scientists revealed that they had analyzed the genomes of a father and daughter wo lived 50,000 years ago in Siberia’s Altai Mountains. There, in a cave, they found a teenage girl’s tooth, and they were soon comparing and contrasting it with the other family members with whom she lived. According to Science Magazine, their home overlooked a lush valley in which red deer, bison and wild horses roamed.  The researchers pointed out that most of the Neanderthal DNA they looked at came from a very small group of males, about as many as in modern day populations of endangered mountain gorillas, showing these people were slowly slipping into the maw of oblivion, not just as individuals, but as an entire species. But that is unimportant. What matters is that, 50,000 years ago, a father and a daughter made their way through life. Perhaps the Dad thought watching a certain dance or looking at a certain type of cave art was dumb and contrived, but then, around a fire at night, as the ancient megafauna howled and roared outside, his daughter laughed or clapped in approval. Perhaps then, he enjoyed it too. It’s likely they knew, from time to time, just how lucky they were to see their world. Because while her eyes, and his eyes, quickly grew milky when they died, and then turned to little puddles of viscous matter, like planets suspended in tapioca, they were once real, and they did once see. I think that, more than anything else, is what is so astounding about the ancient people whose stories we hear. That they saw the world, and each other, and when we find their tattered remains, we know in our hearts how profoundly lucky they were to be here for a while.  I assume that my daughter, my wife and I will vanish completely when we are gone. That’s what happens to 99.9999 percent of the beings who live. But maybe a few fragments will remain. Maybe, 3,000 years from now, or 50,000 years from now, some future people will unearth a tooth in the sediment of what was once Wisconsin, where White-tailed deer and cattle and pickup trucks and motorcycles and Subaru once roamed the valleys and ridges. If they do, they will examine it and wonder what we saw, and wonder if we knew how lucky we were to see it.