I grew up in the Sierra Nevada with wilderness at my fingertips. It was a reverie of frogs and waterfalls, full of sound and motion. Snowy fields became the battlefield for warring factions and their forts. Coyotes would taunt the gods of winter, sending clouds spinning over granite spires. The window of my childhood opened onto the planet Polemonium, suspended in the sky.

The front door led down from the mountains, toward college and a horizon. My high school chemistry teacher introduced molecules and their mechanisms, while Berkeley built those molecules into life. My sense of grandeur was augmented by a curiosity for the minuscule, and the thread that binds all organisms on Earth. That thread would broaden into a path, my path, toward a career in DNA technology. But not just yet.

New Zealand brought me back to the wild. It is a primeval world—a landscape of tree ferns and glaciers, and militant parrots patrolling the tree-less talus. It is also a gentle wilderness, with nothing more dangerous than the weather. The Kiwis are a kind people who bring a touch of humanity to all their endeavors. They befriended me, taught me biochemistry, and how to drive on the left. Then they launched me back into the northern hemisphere.

I returned to the Bay Area, the land of movement. Any cultural tectonics were now in slumber, but the residue was potent, particularly at one biotechnology startup. I was taken under the wing of a visionary entrepreneur with a history isolating enkephalins, and a friendship with the late Kary Mullis, iconoclast and genius. Having pioneered the synthesis of DNA through computer-controlled chemistry, this company now unleashed a new paradigm in drug development, genome sequencing, and disease diagnostics. The world was spinning under our feet.

A girl swept me off my feet. On an island in the bay where my Grandfather had brought me sailing many decades long past, it was there that I met my wife. She is a world traveler with the same longing for quiet contemplation. The seasonal changes that sneak up slowly, and then abruptly. Summer whispers from streams unseen, and bugs droning from serpentine outcrops. The winter scents of mushrooms and redwood duff. Always the laurel wafting around tumbledown mountains. We share those small moments of beauty.

The natural world informs my identity, as does a sense of place.

Ben ayer