Nurture

Howard did his best to instill in Junior the values that had made him a good scientist, just as Samantha attempted to instill the values that made her an expert trophy-philosopher, but Junior Dunwarder was a born pitcher.

At four months old, his father handed him a pacifier. Junior immediately threw it across the room. Most children of this young age do not have the motor skills necessary to perform this complicated feat. Junior had these skills nearly from birth.

At age five, when he’d still not mastered toilet training, Junior Dunwarder threw a baseball at Howard Dunwarder’s head and gave Howard a black eye. Given the toddler’s demeanor, the tendency made him potentially aggressive, or at least destructive. Samantha and Howard took to studying childhood development. They wanted to raise Junior to overcome the conditions of his birth.

The Cold War and Space Race had just begun. The U.S. and U.S.S.R., two global superpowers, were at each others’ throats for a trophies of questionable worth: the planet itself, and the moon orbiting it. For these trophies, each nation would pay dearly in patriots and purchases. The once-insurmountable trophy of nuclear arms had become a fairly standard munition to add to a pile of thousands upon thousands more. Undergraduates made them, cheapening their stature. They meant practically nothing. Toy rockets were a public fascination in both countries, and miniature, injurious explosions would rock neighborhoods from Nevyansk to Nantucket.

It was during this period that Soviet scientists conceived of Dead Hand.

Dead Hand, finally installed and activated in 1985, is a device operating outside the decision making power of Soviet government, instead manned by an independent military contingent which perpetuates itself free of interference. The schematic was a simple but powerful gambit during the Cold War: if the device detected that the Kremlin had been overcome by a nuclear war, confirmed by covertly-located human operators, Dead Hand would launch missiles directly at the United States, the assumed culprit in any such an incursion. Dead Hand will never deactivate, and is still operational to this day outside the direct interference of the Russian government.

from Notes from the Biography of Howard F. Dunwarder, Junior Dunwarder, 2011

Though the device was supposed to be kept a secret, in 1953 it was very hard to keep a secret regarding detection devices from Howard F. Dunwarder. Howard was a researcher, and so during this period of rapid technological innovation, while the governments of the U.S. and U.S.S.R. quarreled endlessly in proxy wars and armament buildups and attempts to fling human bodies into the atmosphere, scientists in the Soviet Union and the US maintained regular, covert communication. They didn’t exchange secrets of war or classified materials, which was the primary reason they weren’t discovered. They exchanged science. Findings. Methodologies. Each country had the bomb, each understood the basic physics of flight, thrust, gravity, and the type of math that leads to slingshot maneuvers. But citizens of the U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. kept discovering innocuous truths about mosquitoes, methods to make staple crop seeds more bountiful, and new properties of light. The findings were too profound to confine within one’s own nationalism: the science was too universally wondrous to keep secret. Each study, or new bit of data, was a point of pride to its originator and nation, as much as any landing of a man on the moon, or destroying human civilization with a single bomb, might be. Their governments didn’t realize the significance of these resources, as most governments are not populated with scientists but instead by generals. Generals are generally only excited by a new weapon. Weapons technology was not the information Howard and his international colleagues would excitedly share.

Howard recognized Dead Hand immediately, when specifications for a very particular arrangement of Geiger counters, earthquake sensors, barometers, cameras and dead man’s switches came through a back channel one afternoon. The Soviet government wouldn’t realize the implications of this science and classify it for another six years. But it didn’t take Howard long to deduce that it was a device meant to detect and respond to an atom bomb explosion. He was deeply troubled by the significance of this event. Dead Hand’s existence would mean that somewhere in the USSR sat a team of scientists patiently anticipating the destruction of their motherland, only to prove that their invention worked.

A disturbed Howard took his troubles to his loving wife.

Samantha Straw Horse married Howard in a small private ceremony just a month after his proposal, four months before Junior’s birth. To an outside observer, her presence gave Howard exactly what he needed to maintain the public perception that he was happily married. She designed awards, while he strove to make new determinations, penciled findings in his notebook, and wrote down observations of the data his devices generated. Samantha lived a quiet, kept life, while designing the trophy that would change the world.

The tone in Howard’s voice alarmed and intrigued Samanth, as he explained the gravity of the situation: a device capable of destroying the world was, if not built, almost certainly under construction or about to be, somewhere in the ground of the U.S.’s greatest living enemy. From the schematics, it appeared it would never stop threatening to activate, until it eventually did. “There’s an old saying in my family,” Howard told Samantha, “that once the bullet is in the chamber, there is only one way to remove the bullet.”

Samantha replied, “There is an Arapaho saying about this as well.” Howard didn’t inquire as to the Arapaho saying, oblivious and terrified of a nuclear holocaust as he was. She volunteered, “When you begin making a weapon, you begin killing.”

Dead Hand, known only to the Dunwarder-Straw Horse household as “the big one,” spurred several weeks of dinner time conversation, as Howard made kabobs and Samantha iced her swollen ankles, immediately before Junior’s birth. Through those conversations, a miracle happened. A device capable of affecting the globe so tragically had made the couple despondent, and then to cheer herself and her husband up, Samantha articulated a global phenomenon that Howard did not understand.

The conversation started innocuously: she’d referred to the the big one as remarkable, even if it were terrifying. In passing, she’d regarded this kind of globe-altering, awesome power as being “sort of cool.” Howard ignorantly inquired what she meant.

And in that instant their usual dynamic was reversed, and she became their household’s resident jester and professor. Howard had asked precisely the question necessary to unlock Samantha’s robust intellect. Her usual quiet faded, and Howard’s often-wagging tongue fell silent and listened with intent.

Samantha explained how “coolness” as a quality of the concept “cool” was bringing U.S. culture together as a whole, particularly youth. Cool transcended generation, gender, race and class lines at a time when these lines were clear and firmly enforced. Though at first glance it was a cultural construction, cool also seemed to Samantha to be quantifiable, in the sense that many of the trophies and awards she’d created and studied in her time had elements of mystery, even while they made a precise determination. Example she often cited were first place trophies in a dog show, or a 9.8 out of 10 and a Gold Medal for technical precision in floor dancing. She explained that coolness seemed to have a universal appeal, while remaining somewhat ethereal. That it could be seen cropping up in other nations as well, and that eventually there might even be an international competition akin to the Olympics or the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show to determine who was the coolest.

Howard, taking Samantha’s assessments into advisement, began conceptualizing a device which might measure coolness, only for the sake of countering the horror of an unleashed “big one.” Her dinner-table treatises on the trophy-philosophy of cool were the precursors to the eventual conception, production and activation of the Dunwardometer. Dead Hand was the first practicable use of what military strategists have come to understand as a “fail-deadly switch,” the opposite of a “fail-safe switch.” After the field of trophy-philosophy grew to be as widely-regarded as military strategy, the Dunwardometer would become known to trophy-philosophers as the first practicable “global celebration switch.”

However for approximately six months, Howard had proven the Dunwardometer conceptually, but suppressed this significant scientific discovery. His wife was due to give birth, and then did. Rather than celebrate his own global celebration switch, he spent the better part of his days changing diapers and comforting his post-partum depressed spouse.

At age five, Junior’s biological father was killed in prison. Junior would never be aware of this fact. His parents did, inexplicably, drink entirely-too-much champagne that night. This was the first time that young Junior Dunwarder heard anyone say the word “bastard.” He did not understand it.

There was a hope that Junior would be nothing like the deceased, and it was this: Junior spent many of his formative years listening to his parents have deeply-intellectual conversations about trophy-philosophy and the nature of measurement, about global politics and the scientific method, about competition and recognition. About fear and hope and humanity and coolness. These conversations developed his intellect and creativity at a rapid clip.

At age six, Junior entered kindergarten and his teachers ignored him immediately. He was intellectually beyond his peers, but this mistreatment set him back several years. Once Junior grew to be a young man who would venture out into the world on his own, Mary Schemmer would not serve him. Nearly all of his teachers singled Junior out for reduced-intensity education.

In a remarkable though not unheard-of act of genetic consequence, Junior Dunwarder had been born with skin much darker than his mother’s. He dressed overly-professionally, like Dr. Howard F. Dunwarder, though he was an Indian indigenous to the land under the Cricket Café, where he could not get lunch. White supremacy reigned in his school and town.

Thanks to his white father’s advocacy, and both his parents’ tutelage and dedication to his upbringing, Junior was able to navigate this injustice fairly successfully. He entered the ACE Academy, Accelerated Children’s Education, in eighth grade as the first Indian student in the state of Colorado to have completed the seventh grade at a college reading level. Incidentally, Junior was the second student of any race to have accomplished this remarkable feat. The first had done so decades prior, in 1933. That first student was Howard F. Dunwarder.