September 7, 2015 - 13:32
Observed through the glassy panes of the storefront window, the clouds appeared ripe with charged energy. Good, I thought. I had been hoping for a thunderstorm to break the summer heat, and the sky looked promising. I returned to my dogeared copy of Tender is the Night, still open and turned down on the table to preserve the progress made. Taking a sip from a tepid cup of coffee, my gaze wandered, resting on the backlit screen of a laptop belonging to a well-dressed man directly in front of me. I took in the whole scene in front of me. He was typing away at a document, contentedly sipping a hot drink, feet crossed at the ankle--let me rephrase: prosthetic feet crossed at the artificial ankle. I was interested. Tugging at the sleeve of his sport coat, it did not seem as though he was working intently on anything. I leaned over from my seat, willing myself to sound casual, and asked, "Are you a writer?" The man, who had a kind face and round, limpid eyes, told me he was a sort of writer. "I do some scientific writing," he explained. He was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. No big deal. He further explained that he was a professor of robotics, and prosthetics. He had, in fact, engineered the mechanical limbs he walked on.
My mind clicked. Some dormant memory of an article in a magazine from a few months ago was being unearthered. "I remember reading something about a man at Harvard who does the same things as you...I think it was in The Atlantic...the man lost his legs to a climbing accident..."
The man gave me a faint smile. "That was me," he said.
I was floored. Excitedly, eagerly, I pried for more details. A softspoken man, he danced vaguely around certain details, but I was determined to piece together his ostensibly fascinating and eventful life. The two workers behind the counter of the coffeehouse had quietly abandoned their stations, and were unabashedly listening in. The man's name was Hugh Herr. A prodigious rock climber at a young age, he lost his legs to frostbite. He had a talent for academics as well, and has used it to make strides in biophysical engineering. Hugh has been written about in numerous significant magazines, has a Ted talk, and is the subject of two documentaries. And by some strange stroke of fate, we found ourselves in the same small coffeeshop on an overcast weekend, and I felt the need to reach out. What luck!