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This story update is part of the �����ԹϺ��������������������, a series highlighting the best writing we’ve ever published, along with author interviews and other exclusive bonus materials. Read “The Same River Twice,” by David Quammen, here.

In the grainy Zoom window, I see Quammen’s walls of shelves, heaving with books, and also a large, empty glass tank.

“I’m in here with Boots the python,” he says, as if it’s totally banal to share office space with a large snake. “That’s his tank.”

Ah, the tank is not empty. That’s cool. And a little terrifying.

“Oh, he’s a sweetheart,” Quammen says. “My wife, Betsy, came downstairs one day about five years ago and said, ‘Don’t get mad at me, but—’ You know how those conversations begin. Betsy says, ‘Don’t get mad at me, but I’ve adopted a python.’ Betsy and I are snake people. I said, ‘What species?’ That’s kind of what passes for our collaborative decision-making.”

Boots is a “very gentle” ball python, Quammen says. “He, like most of our dogs and like the cat, is a rescue.” When Quammen lets Boots crawl around the office, the snake will sometimes slither up and into hidden spaces in the shelves.

“Their favorite habitat is rocky walls. A ball python can go into a niche in a cliff or a mud bank and wedge itself in there like a ball, and it makes it hard for a leopard or a baboon to pull it out and eat it. Boots wedges himself in my bookshelf, and I have to delicately figure out: Which book do I take out next in a way that does not hurt him, bend any of his scales in the wrong direction, to loosen him up a little bit? Eventually, he just sort of falls into my hands.

“He’s only bitten me once, and it was by accident. He was very embarrassed.”

We digress, perhaps. But a conversation with Quammen always contains multitudes: Darwinism, connubial negotiation and bliss, dedication to the literary and the true, and a fierce and gregarious curiosity, with Montana often in the wings. Let’s digress a bit more: had he not bought a used Volkswagen bus in England, and had George McGovern won the U.S. presidency in 1972, it’s very possible Quammen might never have ended up in Montana at all.

He grew up in Cincinnati and got into Yale, where he studied literature and wrote a novel, . He then won a Rhodes Scholarship and headed off to Oxford to earn a graduate degree, writing his thesis on the works of William Faulkner. He obtained the VW bus with money earned from the novel. But in May 1972, Quammen recalls, Richard Nixon ordered the mining of Haiphong Harbor in Vietnam, and “within about 24 hours I left the Rhodes without permission and came back to the U.S. to work for McGovern’s [anti-war] campaign. After McGovern was squashed in November, I promptly went back to England and found that the head of the Rhodes Scholarships hadn’t written me off.”

Quammen got his Oxford degree and then convinced his friend Dennis to ship the VW to a dockyard in New York. Following an unsatisfying stint in Berkeley, California, Quammen decided to drive the bus “to Montana, filled with Penguin Classics and a portable electric typewriter. And a very cheap fly rod, which I soon ran over and replaced with a better cheap fly rod. I arrived in Missoula on September 12, 1973. A significant day in my life.”

OUTSIDE: I came to work at the magazine the year after you wrote “The Same River Twice.” I don’t know if you remember, I was your fact-checker back in those days. I read this essay, and from that moment on I loved your writing. The bones of the story have everything to do with how you came to �����ԹϺ���.
QUAMMEN: In 1981, Steve Byers, E. Jean Carroll, and I were all trying to break into magazine writing from Ennis, Montana, the little town we were living in. I was 33; they were a few years older. We heard that the editor of �����ԹϺ��� magazine was coming to Montana to schmooze with writers, and we thought it’d be great if we could get a shot at meeting that guy and pitch stories to him.

From a phone booth in Bozeman, with a handful of quarters, I cold-called �����ԹϺ��� in Chicago and asked for John Rasmus, editor in chief. My heart was racing. I was nervous. My mission was to say, “If you come to Ennis, Steve and I will take you fly-fishing on the Madison River.”

This young, casual voice comes on the line: “Hi, this is John.” I say, “Hi, John Rasmus. You don’t know me.” I do my little spiel, and he says, “Oh, OK. Cool.”

Steve and I taught him to cast a fly line in my side yard. Then we took him fishing, and we made sure that he caught some fish. By about sunset on this stretch of the Madison, he was landing a 16-inch rainbow trout.

We took him back to the farmhouse where Steve and Jean lived, and we cooked steaks and drank whiskey. By the end of the evening, we were all best friends. At some point I said: I got a story idea for you. I want to write a piece about what’s good about mosquitoes. John said, “Is anything good?” But in the sober light of day he said, “I’m assigning this to you, right?” I mailed the essay off in a manila envelope and thought, What’s going to happen?

What happened was he accepted it and offered you a job as columnist for a slot already known as Natural Acts.
That was the only time, I think, that I ever actually pitched �����ԹϺ��� an idea. After that I’d just send him a piece, usually on time, but at the last minute: “Here’s an essay on sea cucumbers.” “Here’s an essay on giant Pacific octopus.” “Here’s an essay on why crows get bored.” Which is because they’re too intelligent for their station in life.

When I was doing the column, I tended always to look for some kind of synergy between elements that were unexpectedly combined, but when you put them together… well, son of a gun. I had taken some courses in zoology at the University of Montana when I lived in Missoula. I had taken a course in entomology, another one in aquatic entomology, and another one in ichthyology. I was interested in how spring creeks worked, the fact that they maintain a constant temperature and therefore have a 12-months-of-the-year growing season and can be very productive. This creek behind Steve and Jean’s house was a spring creek.

And then Steve and Jean came to an end. I had so revered their union that, when they split, it gutted me. Then, several years later, I was noodling up a column.

I had that spring creek idea, but it was only half of a column. I needed another half. I needed the yang to that yin. That creek that I fished on with Steve, and the end of their marriage and the end of our special moment, the three of us in that town, became the yang of this piece. I always thought of that time as—there’s a wonderful sentence at the very end of , Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of Paris. He says, “This is how Paris was in the early days when we were very poor and very happy.”

One thing I enjoy about the essay is that there are no identifiers—I don’t know where it is except that it’s in Montana. As I reread it recently, I thought about how we are now so information saturated. This piece is almost allegorical—the opposite of online culture.
It’s a very particular, very personal story, but I wanted it to have some sort of universal dimension. I wanted it to have legs. I want to give myself credit for an instinct that not naming the town, not naming the people, not naming the specifics would give it a little bit of permanence. I was describing science with great care and, I hope, precision, but also connecting it with things that were very unscientific—either artistic or simply emotional.

I love that �����ԹϺ��� was a place where you could do that, and everybody had the good sense to keep letting you do it.
I did between 152 and 155 columns, something like that. All those wonderful people at �����ԹϺ��� just letting me do any damn crazy thing, as long as I could make it work and get it in on time. It was a fool’s paradise.

But you started out wanting to write fiction, right?
I wanted to be a novelist. I had taken one science course in college, a biology course, and it was not a good biology course. Didn’t even mention Charles Darwin.

I discovered Faulkner when I was a sophomore at Yale, and I became obsessed with his work. I studied him with a great teacher and a great friend to me, Robert Penn Warren, who knew Faulkner, and who was himself a southerner and a towering American man of letters. When I was a senior, I was rewriting what became my first published novel, To Walk the Line.

But I was a middle-class white male from a happy childhood in Ohio. The world didn’t need that guy to be a novelist. When I got to Montana I started reading nonfiction. Voraciously. For the first time.

What prompted you to do that?
I had always been interested in the natural world, but I had been in New Haven and then Oxford—not places where the natural world is very strongly present. I got to Montana, and I got back to the natural world. I was interested in feeling the cold and the snow and feeling the flow of the rivers. But also, I was interested in thinking about it. I was interested in ecology and evolutionary biology. I started reading Darwin. I started reading Heraclitus. I started reading Herodotus. I started reading Jean-Jacques Rousseau. I started reading every which way: Loren Eiseley and J.B.S. Haldane and Mary Kingsley and Annie Dillard and others. And I saw people doing things with nonfiction that were every bit as creative and imaginative as fiction, and much more creative and imaginative than 97 percent of novels.

I want to ask about your books on pandemics, which are both highly literary and diligently reported. You were prescient on this topic, having published , your 2012 book about the rise in zoonotic diseases that transmit dangerously from animals to humans. A decade later came Breathless, in which you argue persuasively for the zoonotic theory of COVID-19 and against the theory that the virus escaped from a virology lab in Wuhan, China.   
One story is the imagined story of a lab leak, and the other is the inferential story of a zoonotic spillover. There is a lot of empirical evidence to support but not finally prove the idea that COVID originated with a zoonotic spillover. There’s a whole historical and scientific context for that. There are pieces of immediate evidence that support that idea.

There’s no empirical evidence to support the lab story. But it is a very, very powerful, enticing story. And that is why it has legs, in my opinion. One of the things that they argue on that side is, “Well, if this came from a zoonotic spillover from a bat, why haven’t we found the original virus in the bat? It’s been four years now. That’s very suspicious.”

Well, no. The problem is they don’t know anything about the history of zoonotic diseases. With the Marburg virus, for example, it took 41 years to find the bat. With Ebola it’s been 48 years, and we still don’t have the answer. It is not mysterious that the last section of evidence in the structure of empirical support for zoonotic spillover of COVID hasn’t been found.

Are you working on a book now?
Yeah. My desk is covered with files, files, files, books, books, and files. I’m working on a book on cancer as an evolutionary phenomenon. I’ve been incubating this book for 17 years.

How is cancer evolutionary?
There is a school of thought that I stumbled across in 2006 or 2007 that says to understand cancer, you have to understand it from a Darwinian perspective. Every tumor is a population of cells. As a tumor begins, the cells start mutating more and more. As a tumor grows, it’s a population of cells that vary from one another with genetic variation. And they’re competing. They’re competing for space. They’re competing for blood. They’re competing for oxygen, for other resources that allow them to grow. And when you have a population of variant individuals competing for resources in order to survive and replicate themselves—does that sound familiar? You turn the crank and you have evolution by natural selection.

So why does chemo so often not work? An oncologist prescribes a drug, and I don’t know how much cancer you’ve experienced in your family or your life—

I had breast cancer, and my husband died of lymphoma.
All right. Ouch. Yes. So an oncologist says, “We’re going to treat this with chemo. This is a good drug.” And the chemo knocks down the cancer for six months or so. You get some improvement. And then the cancer becomes resistant to that drug, so you’re forced to use a different drug. Why does it become resistant? For the same reason that a field of grasshoppers becomes resistant to the insecticide DDT. You hit the grasshoppers with DDT one year. You kill off 99 percent of the grasshoppers, and 1 percent of the grasshoppers happen to have genetic resistance to DDT. Two years later, your field is filled with grasshoppers again. This is cancer as an evolutionary phenomenon.

If we live long enough and are lucky enough, we’ll all die of cancer. Lucky enough because it is a result of, among other things, but importantly, the cumulative number of cell divisions that you have. But here’s a question: Why do whales not get cancer?

Whales?
It’s a mystery. It’s called . Whales live a long time, and they have lots and lots of cells. Their cells are not larger than ours, they just have more of them. If you trace a linear curve, whales should be dying of cancer in early middle age, all of them, and they’re not.

Are there any tiny animals that don’t get cancer?
Yes. The naked mole rat, which lives in burrows in the Middle East. It has hardly any fur. It’s blind. It lives underground. A naked mole rat lives to be 20 or 30. A mouse lives to be two. There are cancer biologists who have whole colonies of naked mole rats and have been studying them for 40 years.

This conversation makes me want to be huge. Or very small.
Lisa, just remember: �����ԹϺ��� in the 1980s, that’s what it was like, when we were very young and very happy.