Headline        Bridge keeper  
Subhead         Work of esteemed Beringia researcher David Hopkins inspires Alaskan to write a true-science thriller   
Run Date        2/29/2004      
Day     Sunday  Page    D1     
Section         Life   
Story Byline    By SANDI GERJEVIC Anchorage Daily News 

      In 1974, a floatplane buzzed away from a lonely, no-name lake on the northern Seward Peninsula, leaving behind David Hopkins. The geologist walked the shoreline, scraping and studying its eroding banks. It was a day not unlike countless others in his career, a day of walking and digging and thinking. In a new book, "The Last Giant of Beringia: The Mystery of the Bering Land Bridge," writer Dan O'Neill describes how, as Hopkins eyed the bank strata that day, he noted a distinct band of tephra, or ash, evidence of volcanic activity, probably from maars, or surface eruptions, thousands of years before. The following day, still working alone, the scientist discovered a scattering of vegetation in the strata below the ash line. As he walked and thought, an idea settled. The ash was a blanket that covered a snapshot of time. The twigs and leaves were ancient detritus from that time. In a gripping passage from his book, O'Neill describes the thought process that led Hopkins to a crucial discovery in his life's work, a study of the Bering Land Bridge. "The possibilities raced through his mind like the whirring icons of a slot machine. Then, one by one, they clicked into place. If the ash was from Devil Mountain, then the eruption was probably during Wisconsin time. Click. If Wisconsin time, then the land bridge was in place. Click. If the land bridge was in place, then the detritus covered by the ash was land bridge vegetation. Click. Jackpot. ... It was an actual buried surface of the Bering Land Bridge, still there, intact, frozen in the permafrost beneath the gray tephra." Much later, when Hopkins and colleagues had a chance to sample the area, they found seeds, roots, buds and moss still preserved from the era, about 18,000 years ago. For the first time, O'Neill writes, these plants of the land bridge "were not being inferred, they were being observed." Scientifically, it was thrilling. But the drama of such a seminal find might have remained buried in a box of Hopkins' old field notebooks and maps had O'Neill not taken an interest in the science of the Bering Land Bridge, generally accepted as a dryland connection during the last ice age for the migration of humans and animals between Asia and North America, also known as Beringia. O'Neill is best known as the author of "The Firecracker Boys," a 1994 account of a bizarre Cold War plan to demonstrate the peacetime adaptability of thermonuclear technology by detonating six bombs on the Alaska coastline. The book earned him the Alaska Historical Society's Historian of the Year award in 1994. O'Neill's work on Hopkins is set to be released in May by Westview Press; advance sales are already being offered on Amazon.com. The writer, who has lived in Alaska since 1975, is a former research associate in the oral history program at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He has been a columnist for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. His sideline is building custom cabins. A university colleague, Bill Schneider, first urged O'Neill to write the story of Hopkins, one of Alaska's most eminent scientists. The National Park Service was also looking for a Hopkins biographer. As Beringia's premier researcher, his name is firmly linked with the idea of a land bridge, which the Park Service has for years proposed as an international park incorporating Russian holdings. O'Neill was interested in the project but from a broader viewpoint. He saw potential in the greater story of Hopkins' life work on Beringia. O'Neill had no interest in writing biographies but aspired to a brand of writing that unravels the intricacies of science in a compelling way -- a kind of science detective story. He gave two examples of books he modeled, "Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World" by Mark Kurlansky and "Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time" by Dava Sobel. Both books present science in a popular way. The latter, especially, concerns the telling of a mystery. 'SINS OF MY LIFE' If O'Neill was looking for a scientific mystery, the Bering Land Bridge was a great one. Scholars have speculated about it since at least the 1500s, when, as O'Neill points out in his research, a Jesuit missionary set down ideas about how the Americas might have been peopled.  Remarkably, when Hopkins took on the question beginning in the 1950s, little was still known about the land bridge. No one had proved its existence. Did the land bridge exist for long? How wide was it? Was it a polar desert or verdant steppe? Did animals roam the land bridge? Did people walk across it? What happened to those people? How Hopkins and colleagues began chipping away at the puzzle was the perfect writing challenge. O'Neill knew the land bridge story had universal appeal. What better way to tell it than "over the shoulder" of its primary researcher? O'Neill was already familiar with Hopkins from his research on "The Firecracker Boys," whose theme was straight out of the Dr. Strangelove school of natural resource management. The idea was to show the world how nuclear energy could be used to reshape Earth's surface to suit humanity's needs. Physicists of the day called it "geographical engineering." O'Neill had interviewed Hopkins about his work providing geological information to these so-called plowshare physicists, who, Hopkins later commented, seemed like "bright young guys looking for a project." Previously, Hopkins had provided the military a study of Alaska lands most like Moscow or Leningrad to see how a nuclear attack might affect the Soviet landscape.  Sometime later, reviewing his role in this, he owned up to it as "one of the great sins of my life." In light of how other people and institutions were far less forthcoming about their own Cold War roles, the honesty of Hopkins' statement impressed O'Neill. But more than that, the geologist created a paradox that interested the writer. How could a man known for his intellect, for being a great scientist and a really good guy have done the wrong thing? In writing about Hopkins, O'Neill relied on oral histories, Hopkins' journals, diaries, field notes and a rich cache of letters, including those he'd sent to his parents upon arriving in Alaska. He encouraged Hopkins to establish an archival collection at the university, which the geologist eventually did, pooling maps, photographs and battered waterproof field notebooks scrawled with real-time thoughts. The two met many times over a period of years. When Hopkins' kidneys began to fail late in his life, O'Neill visited him during dialysis treatment. Hooked to a machine, immobile for hours at a time, the professor welcomed the diversion. Even after Hopkins moved to California to be near his children, O'Neill kept in touch. And Hopkins continued to answer questions as best he could remember and to read over O'Neill's drafts. O'Neill described his subject as hardworking, honest, relaxed and engaging. "I loved the guy," he said.  'HEBE' Hopkins got his start in the 1940s, working for the Alaska section of the U.S. Geological Survey, based in California. He worked there more than 40 years. From 1985 until 1999, he was at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where he directed the Alaska Quaternary Center. Hopkins' expertise in Beringia science was so revered among students, some of them nicknamed him "Godkins." He once held talk sessions in his Fairbanks home, marathon evenings lovingly remembered as "Quaternary Rap." "It kind of started out with people just coming over and Rachel, his wife, baking cookies," said Owen Mason, an archaeologist and former student.  Hopkins would bring fresh journal articles, and the rappers would debate theories. Mason recalled the Hopkins home as resplendent with curiosities, sculptures and a "midden of books," the latter of which Hopkins loaned without compunction. He was a person of enormous charisma, Mason said. He was an attentive listener and someone who could "get precisely to the heart of the question." Mason typically received written papers back from Hopkins so dense with comments, he marveled at how his mentor could follow out every line of reasoning so quickly. Hopkins was a gifted writer, able to simplify complex thoughts. Former students still refer to Hopkins' 1967 book on the land bridge as "The Old Testament" and his 1982 work on Beringia as "The New Testament." The seed of Hopkins' intellect grew from his staid New Hampshire family. As a child, he learned botany from his mother, who was nicknamed Hebe after a character in Greek mythology. She guided her son on wildflower walks in the woods near their rural home. When she undertook to write a history of their town of Greenfield, she encouraged her son to come along on the fieldwork. They walked old map lines and uncovered the foundations of buildings that no longer existed. The time spent in intellectual fun with his mother lodged in Hopkins a "training in the methodologies of science and history," O'Neill wrote. Hopkins was educated at the University of New Hampshire, where -- although he adored trains and saw them as his true calling -- he studied engineering and eventually geology. Three weeks into doctoral studies at Harvard University in 1942, Hopkins' career took a sharp turn when he received a telegram from the USGS offering him a job. He was 20. In "Giant," O'Neill goes on to describe Hopkins' enthusiasm for Alaska, a place where he could clamber over glaciers and hike open country, a landscape so immense and different from insular New England. The book addresses Hopkins' first marriage, his wartime posting to the Aleutians and how intense personal loss changed him, how the 1960s made their mark and how he eventually began pursuit of one of the world's great mysteries. 'HOP-KINS' As a scientist, Hopkins was a master of many disciplines and a synthesizer. It may have been his greatest gift, O'Neill said -- bringing together people of varying disciplines and getting them to at least entertain one another's theories, to see how other pieces of the puzzle could fit with theirs. His enthusiasm crossed continents and skirted political divides. He cheerfully collaborated with Russians before it was commonly done. He moved among some of the most brilliant academics of his day yet also had great rapport in the field with Alaska Natives and Alaska sourdoughs, both of whom he considered valuable observers in his region of study.  Perhaps it was the long-ago influence of Hebe's intellect, but Hopkins was especially known for encouraging and promoting the research of female students. One of them was Julie Brigham-Grette, now professor and associate head of the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Hopkins didn't push his theories on others, she said. He developed a line of reasoning that led others to buckle, to question their own opinions. "He loved to think out loud," said Brigham-Grette, who did fieldwork with Hopkins in the early 1980s. They studied protein decomposition in mollusk fossils on Alaska's western coastline to help date the rise and fall of the land bridge -- it's believed the bridge came and went, depending on the extent of Northern Hemisphere glaciation, 10 to 15 times over the past million years. "We would go to great lengths to prove or disprove each other's ideas," Brigham-Grette said. "It was almost like sport, in a sense, and a lot of fun. I learned so much from him." Hopkins' most valuable lesson: It's OK to be wrong once in a while. To Brigham-Grette, that was a refreshing and mature idea in academic circles. In summer 2002, she was afloat on the Coast Guard icebreaker Healy in Bering Strait, taking marine sediment core samples from the land bridge that's now under water. "The whole time we were out there, I felt like David was with us. He would have been thrilled to be out there, telling us what to do next, where to go next," Brigham-Grette said. The most exciting new science related to the land bridge, she said, has to do with the argument of when people might have crossed it. Recent evidence of humans living in Monte Verde, Chile, more than 12,500 years ago suggests people living in coastal Beringia might have evolved into a seafaring culture -- how else could they have migrated so quickly? There are still a lot of questions, she said. In 2001, when Brigham-Grette heard Hopkins was dying, she traveled to Menlo Park, Calif., to be with her mentor. He had decided to stop dialysis, which meant imminent demise. He was 79. "People were calling from all over the world to say goodbye," she said. Years ago, the two researchers had passed many hours on empty tundra waiting for a plane to arrive. Now they spent one last day together. They had a beer, and Brigham-Grette brought her friend ice cream and a favorite candy bar. In talking over old times on the Beringia hunt, she recalled, Hopkins said something like "I just wish I could live long enough to see how it all turns out."  O'Neill opens his book with a gathering of scientists in Khabarovsk in 1973, in conference largely due to Hopkins' land bridge book. In a spontaneous outburst, the scientists began pounding the tables and chanting "HOP-KINS" in hopes of a speech from their esteemed colleague. O'Neill ends his book this way: "On a perfect spring day, a small boy bursts into the bright New Hampshire sunshine, running across the yard as the screen door bangs behind him. ... He moves through green woods, through leaf-dappled light, without apparent plan, finding starflowers and trillium, jack-in-the-pulpit and sweet fern. On his belly beside a cool-running brook, he lifts a string of toads' eggs, dripping and flashing like treasure. Leaning against the kitchen door frame, his young mother dries her hands on her apron and watches him disappear into the thicket. For a while, she lingers there as if she could see him still. He is crossing the stream. Stone to stone. Happily exploring. Happily putting the world together. Granite, trillium and toad. Cellar holes and Indian trails. She smiles. Pleased. Well pleased." 

ONGOING STUDIES: For a list of research projects funded this year under the Shared Beringian Heritage Program of the National Park Service, see www.adn.com/life.         
Cutline         Photo courtesy of Julie Brigham-Grette  Geologist David Hopkins is respected for his studies regarding a land bridge across the Bering Sea that may have linked Alaska to Russia. Hopkins is shown here in 1987 working on the western coast of Baldwin Peninsula south of Kotzebue.  Photo courtesy of Dan O'Neill Author Dan O'Neill  David M. Hopkins Papers, archives of the Elmer E. Rasmuson Library, University of Alaska Fairbanks A page from David Hopkins' field notebook in 1974 showing him for the first time putting together his land bridge theory.