3 Nerds and a Goat
I’m on my way back from visiting my folks in South Carolina, and I’m at a rest stop on the border. Something stops me in my tracks and takes me back 40 years in an instant.
It’s a statue of this fella, Ron McNair:
This stops me because I haven’t thought about McNair in a very long time. That’s probably due to trauma, but it could also be due to being older and having way more stuff in my brain—but the trauma explanation really tracks, given the Space Shuttle had just blown up on national television, right at a pivotal moment in my life, and McNair was on board.
In my own memory, this is the beginning of the end of my childhood. Puberty was right around the corner, and so was middle school. There are other good candidates for this milestone, like when Optimus Prime dies in Transformers the Movie, or when we moved from the neighborhood where all my childhood friends lived over to a different ‘hood, but the Challenger Explosion represents a stark reminder that the world is dangerous, and death can happen to anyone.
McNair wasn’t just some ordinary astronaut. He was from South Carolina, just like me, and he was a total nerd when it came to science. As a kid, he refused to leave the whites-only library, where they had books about science he wanted to read. The cops eventually showed up, and McNair was allowed to check the books out.
He would go on to earn a PhD from MIT in the physics of lasers, no kidding. Seriously nerdy, and seriously smart. Here was a dude from my home state who had risen to become one of the world’s truly elite scientist-adventurers: a NASA astronaut.
All this, too, in a state that proudly raised the Confederate battle flag above its state capitol building when McNair was still just ten years old and nearly eleven—exactly the same age I was when the Challenger blew up in front of me, and McNair died in a fireball we all witnessed. That flag was still flying nine years after his death, when I left the state behind for good.
This isn’t just about McNair, though! This one really struck me since I literally saw a glimpse of my own past (tell me if that’s a fair use of the word literally in the comments if you want to), but I wanted to share how other so-called nerds have come from my home state, too.
Robert Jordan, by contrast, never left South Carolina. I mean, he literally left the state after choosing to fight in Vietnam.
Unlike others who had been drafted, Jordan signed up willingly and became a helicopter gunner, which was far from a safe position. He saw some intense action while in Vietnam, including a moment where time seemed to slow down for him and he could react in real time to a rocket-propelled grenade, which Jordan shot out of the air—or at least, he believed this when it was happening, as he described in interviews later on in life.
Jordan’s writing in The Wheel of Time series is widely regarded as among the best work in fantasy ever written, and part of this surely comes from his experience in life-and-death situations. When he got back from war, he started writing fantasy, and never stopped.
Jordan imagined an intricate realm where the one power flows, and fantastical creatures like those you might discover in D&D abound.
Speaking of Dungeons and Dragons, there’s one more nerd from SC I really need to bring up. Honestly, this dude might be the nerdiest of all, yet he hosts the most popular late-night television show in history.
Stephen Colbert is no ordinary nerd. As a tween, he got a sneak peek at Star Wars about two weeks before it aired nationally, after winning a radio contest where he called in to win. I’m not sure how much nerd-cred this alone gives him, but the fact that Colbert makes sure to tell anyone who will listen that he was one of the first human beings ever to see Star Wars kind of pushes him over the edge, doesn’t it?
Besides Star Wars, Colbert may be the celebrity who is most knowledgeable about the Lord of the Rings universe. And, like, knowledgeable doesn’t really explain the insane passion that emanates every time he corrects someone on some Tolkien lore. This goes even further: Colbert was once on the set of The Desolation of Smaug (where he makes a brief cameo, of course), and he got into a trivia contest with the resident Tolkien expert… and won decisively.
South Carolina has a complicated and nuanced history, rich with the inhumanities of slavery and torture, but also rife with intelligence and creativity. The persistent racism and antiquated ways of thinking still persist and are still devastating and oppressing for people like me, but there are some of us who have managed to escape anyway.
Colbert is from SC, huh?