Lake 223 and The Man Who Made Acid Rain
Schindler in arm cast (from a float plane accident) David Schindler grew up in a small town in Minnesota, in the Red River Valley. His father farmed potatoes and sunflowers. His mother taught music. It was the kind of upbringing where you fixed things yourself, or they stayed broken, and Schindler later credited that farm logic with allowing him confidence in tinkering, in taking things apart to understand how they worked. Minnesota is on the edge of the Canadian Shield, ancient Precambrian rock that is the core of North America. Lakes are everywhere up here. In High School, he took a month-long fishing trip into northwestern Ontario, into the boreal lakes cut from the Precambrian rock. Something about the place must have resonated with him. In college, Professor Gabriel Comita gave him his first real research opportunity, studying lake food web energetics, and that was enough. He was off. In 1962, he won a Rhodes Scholarship and went to Oxford. He began working under Nikola...