Noah (left) and his older brother, Seth, look at tadpoles on the north shore of Lake Superior. (Photo courtesy of Noah Whiteman)
Noah Whiteman, an associate professor in the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley, has always known how to survive. He moved to Sax-Zim, a rural area in Minnesota, when he was 11 and spent the next seven years learning to fish and hunt with his naturalist dad and hiding that he was gay. When a boy he'd been friends with started to bully him at every chance he got, Noah knew it was time to get out. Read the transcript. Following is the full interview with Noah Whiteman. It's been edited for clarity. Berkeley News: What was your childhood like? Noah Whiteman: I was born in Fountain Valley, California, then moved to Duluth, Minnesota, when I was 3. At 11, I moved to the middle of nowhere to an area called Sax-Zim in northeastern Minnesota. My dad got a job working as a manager at a furniture store. It was kind of a destination furniture store between the Iron Range cities, where Bob Dylan was from, and Duluth. This was kind of in the middle, basically in a bog. A huge boggy area. It's the southern extent of the Boreal Forest - you know, that big, expanse of black spruce and moss that goes from Labrador to the Ural mountains. So this was the southern tip of that. So it was kind of like that up there - wilderness, wolves, pitcher plants, not a lot of people, humid in the summer and brutally cold in the winter. There was a lot of alone time. How did you feel about having that much alone time at that age?
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