Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
and investments and plantations in Cuba. This man's sons were playboys. They joked that their goal
was to spend the family wealth before they passed on, and they did.
Michael's grandfather was the only one who married. His son, Joseph Manuel Hurley Jr., was
an only child, come late into his parents' life of wealth and status, overseas investments and art col-
lections. He spent his first five years on the French Riviera, raised and fed by his maid, his mother
enjoying breakfasts in bed, often away. The idea of a close, loving family became his dream, one
he shared with Michael's mother, Jean Heyer, whose family had immigrated from Germany in the
1800s. Joseph Hurley graduated from Harvard College, then Harvard Business School, and became
a stockbroker, limiting his ambitions so he could enjoy raising his children.
Michael was born in Beverly, Massachusetts, in 1952. When he was five, the family moved to
Hamilton: a place of hunt clubs and fox chases, where the first streetlight in town was installed for
a horse crossing near the polo fields. The area had stone walls and rivers, swamps, lakes, and forest,
and wasn't far from Boston or the ocean.
Not long after moving there, he walked into his new backyard and climbed onto a tree stump. In
the brush just below him lay a gleaming white-and-copper-banded necklace. But when he crouched
and reached for it, it moved. He jerked his hand back and ran to find his father, who came and killed
the snake with a shovel.
They brought the two-foot-long snake inside, and his father looked through the
Encyclopedia
Britannica
until he found it—a milk snake, an uncommon serpent known to eat rats and mice, good
to have around the house and not dangerous, though often mistaken for a copperhead. There was
that moment, the father and children at the table, all realizing his mistake, and then, finally, after a
silence, he cleared his throat and admitted his error.
After that experience, Michael set about learning the scientific names of all the reptiles and am-
phibians he could find, and spent his summers in the swamps or at the Audubon Nature Camp. At
home, he developed a collection of live animals including chameleons, iguanas, pythons, boa con-
strictors, a young alligator, and a large snapping turtle that a nearby sanctuary was going to kill
since it was eating the ducks. At the Audubon camp, he won a competition in which he identified
leaves and feathers, and as a result was selected to attend Wildwood, an overnight camp. The ex-
perience catapulted him through other courses and trainings, through Phillips Exeter Academy and
finally Harvard, where the classes, he recalled, were significantly easier.
Anthropology, however, and not science, inspired his next passion. The idea of different world-
views fascinated him, how within another's culture the world could be transformed—or how he
might be, seeing it that way. He gradually focused his studies on shamanism, looking at whether
anthropologists should participate in a culture to understand it. Students and professors spoke about
the importance of objectivity, but how could he understand a foreign worldview while rooted in a
supposedly objective Western culture?
During this time, when Michael questioned the usefulness of his studies, his father, who had
sacrificed satisfaction in his career and had the obligation of raising and educating five children,
gave him a key piece of advice.
“Do anything,” he told him, “but whatever you do, use this time to learn as much as you can.
Don't worry about getting a job. If you learn as much as you can at college, that will stand you
well. That will be good for you. Don't try to focus on one technical thing, and don't try to select
something that will help you earn money. If you do that when your mind is forming, you will lose
so much. And if you become a stockbroker, I will shoot you.”
