yellowfield biological surveys

Big Three-Headed River

2011-12-29T00:41:00.000-08:00

A single dusty lamp lights a long hallway in an old woman's mansion.
She sits in the living room by the firelight in the evening, knitting a sweater for someone with knobby fingers, but the neck doesn't look quite right. You wonder if it's poor lighting or maybe your eyesight or your mind, but you look closer and no, your mind has not slipped and it’s not the light or your eyes; the sweater has three holes for three heads. You want to put your hand on her delicate shoulder and reassure her, but you fear that whatever it is that she contracted is highly contagious and you pull your hand back and put it in your pocket. “Nice fire.”
Jack walked out of the living room and shook his head. He took off his bifocals and held them up to the lamp. "I swear I saw the fellow who wears that sweater in a temple in India. Had a cup of rice in front of him." He rolled up his sleeves. "Poor fella didn't touch it. Didn't move a muscle. People had to carry him around on poles."
I always liked listening to Jack. He was like an old leather suitcase with decals from faraway lands, a walking travel brochure, and he had an easy way of conversation. You could ignore him for a while as he exhumed tales of colonnades and big game and tribes and fever and then jump into the conversation for a while and then ignore him again as he described man-eating reptiles and jungle kings and he never seemed to notice or care. "I thought the sweater would have six arms."
"That's probably right. Maybe I saw the guy at the state fair. Or up front in a cathedral. That’s right." He held his glasses at arm’s length and swiped a lens with his right thumb. "It must be this. All I see is dust."
The flooring creaked beneath my feet. "Which state fair?"
"I can’t recall." He blew on his glasses. "Oops. That dust was the original owner of the house and there, away he goes, off into the air, maybe all the way to heaven. I must show proper respect." The old woman started to cough.
“I think the original owner is everywhere.”
He did a slight bow before his glasses. “That’s what you call omnipresence, my boy.” He looked at the firelight down the hall, "I'll go stoke the fire," and walked into the living room.
As he walked away, I thought about the forgotten state and wondered why it would be such a likely place for three-headed people. Jack always had the appearance of being hot on the trail of something, even if he wasn’t; sort of like a toothless old Labrador retriever barking up a tree full of abandoned squirrel nests. But if there were more triune people in that state why would they be considered such an oddity as to display to gawking mobs at the fair? Maybe there were fewer three-headed people there than the average; they were a vanishing species, a real rarity. I read about a gated community once where everyone had recessive genes dangling from their mortal shell in fantastic ways. So I wondered which states were surrounded by gates. I knew some city-states had moats. Out here they used levees. But they didn’t stop anything; just as soon as we built them, the river cut across a gooseneck upstream and changed course and ambled about the land behind the levee, filling up Main Street so many times we renamed the town Venice. I felt the urge to move wherever that state was and find out for myself. Maybe I would get a job as a freakish one-headed man housed behind glass in the front of a cathedral, chained next to the marble man with three heads and six arms, fed balls sweet rice on banana leaves by pilgrims bearing candles. This is when I began to wonder if there was such thing as a phantom head.
The noise of Jack rattling the fireplace utensils interrupted my deep thoughts. This was Jack's first time in this house in twenty years, since he was in college studying liquor. The old woman muttered something about the fireplace and Jack replied loudly, "Destroyer. The destroyer." He must have been talking about his days with the Merchant Marines off the Atlantic coast. I could see the fire reflecting off of the walls of the living room, bright enough to signal planes flying overhead. "Hey!” I shouted. "Save some light for tomorrow." A few hours later he fell asleep on the sofa in front of the fire, which had retired as well, reduced to a few shy embers, winking like red stars on a summer night.
The following morning crept into the sky slowly, no sudden, bright, sunny fanfare as one would hope, more gradual, like the way color fades from a fish washed up on a beach. Jack was standing in the back yard. "Where is the light? Is it cloudy here all the time? You forget to pay the electric bill?"
I shrugged. My shoulders felt heavy, both of them.
Rubbing his hands together, he surveyed the skies. "Man, it looks like a burial shroud, clouds from horizon to horizon. Nothing can see out and nothing can see in." He looked down at his feet, old deck shoes decorated with grass clippings, like parsley flakes on two cod filets. "As much as I want to see what might be up there, I can't imagine anyone wanting to see what was going on down here."
I thought about the old woman knitting. "Like the door to her basement."
"Yeah. We just think that there’s something valuable in there."
“I don’t want to know.” The old woman had lived in that house all her life, the daughter of the first owner, Mr. Shaunheunessey, who ran a lumber mill down by the river. She never married. I could see her sitting at her window knitting ever since I could remember. Sweaters and more sweaters and socks, hats, mittens, and scarves, I suppose. She must have made thousands of them over the decades, but nobody knew what she did with them. There were as many rumors as there were mouths. She gave them to charity, she sent them to orphanages, she clothed the monks at the monastery on the hill. She had relatives back in Europe. Maybe they were peasants and would have nothing but stiff, black rags to wrap around their feet and hands were it not for the package of woolens they received every fall. That wasn’t a house, it was a textile mill. The windows reflected the grey skies like cataracts.
The smoke rising from the chimney caught Jack’s attention. "Maybe the clouds are coming from us."
Something splashed in the river down below and we both turned. Nothing.
He put his hands in his pockets. "Or someone just closed the lid on us. How would I know?" We plodded across the front lawn toward the river.
He stopped. His face tightened. His open hand swept from right to left. "There!"
I followed the sweep of his hand and my eyes drifted to the river. Bleach bottles collected in an eddy. I started thinking about bleach bottles and I wondered what would happen if they were given enough time and given ideal conditions - an ammonia atmosphere with electrical discharges and some giant, strong, benevolent, philanthropic scientist hovering over the whole affair making sure that random events wouldn’t interfere with the rigorously controlled experiment and send it spinning out of control, destroying the atmosphere and engulfing the scientist in a superheated ball of ionized ammonia gas - I wondered if they would replicate. Bleach bottles laying eggs in the muck at the bottom of the river, laced with heavy metals. Prime habitat. The bleach bottle eggs would feed on the heavy metals and grow into nymph stage, then emerge from the primordial soap and shed their brittle, UV-degraded casing and float downstream. Adulthood is reached in two to three months and the males accumulate on the banks of the river in the stiff, phosphate foam, displaying for the females, expanding and contracting their cylindrical bodies, emitting hypochlorites, drawing the timid females out from the overhanging brush and tires and rusting cables and washing machines and -
Jack broke in. "Over here. The Lilliputian Forest, the industrial lawn, the engineered turf, managed for sustained yields, millions of dollhouse board feet, harvested every week by pale, flabby suburban farmers on toy tractors, a cheery, iridescent-green, like the felt on a pool table, an Irish festival, thatched with battle-hardened European and Asian strains, bathed in surplus chemicals produced in the last Great War." He pointed at the lawn.
Now I was looking at the lawn.
"This chemistry of war has a long history - in fact, you can quote me, it was conceived exactly twelve minutes after the discovery of fire, just enough time to finish the roast leg of auroch."
I squinted and for a second I thought I saw many small aurochs munching in the grass. "There!"
I don’t think he heard me, he was on the scent of something. "I suppose two men discovered fire but each one wanted the discovery for himself. Here, my friend, was the birth of the marketplace: First, a new and exciting product - Fire! But then, who would be the producer and who would be the consumer? Thus, the need for another product, one which determined market positions. And the market does not disappoint! The second new and exciting product - The Fire-throwing Device! After working out the glitches with a few trial runs, the market moves again! Now we have but one producer, and the consumer, well, he -he was, shall we say, consumed...but! The producer would have many, many children. And the marketplace grew and grew and lived on and on." Jack smiled broadly.
"Hey, Jack,” I asked, “Did you ever invent something?" We were at the river's edge.
Jack shook his head. "Nope. But I worked in a patent office in England once." He picked up a head-sized piece of concrete and heaved it into the river, sending up a fountain of greenish-grey.
"Maybe we can - "
"I think, if there was a patent office back when fire was introduced into the market, the proliferation of fire would have been prevented." Two fish surfaced near the splash, dark grey backbones rolling along like knobby tires. "I mean, I know that there was a day not too long ago when enemy assaults on castles and walled cities were repelled by dumping boiling oil from positions above the gates. Then naval battles were won by the feared Greek Fire; fountains of burning pine resin and sulfur vomiting from the mouths of brass lions on the prow of the ship. Terrifying. But consumer demands were strong, so naturally the markets produced new and improved terror: Jellied gasoline raining down from clear, blue skies, the Devil’s Thunderstorm, liquid fire that consumed palm-leaf villages and paper houses and their sleepy inhabitants. It's a growth market, this destruction business."
I looked out across the water, sudsy, like pureed avocado. "They always come up with something." I thought about a one-headed job opening in Indiana and traveling the byways in a circus caravan jammed with one-headed freaks, the eighth wonder of the world, arms dangling out the air holes, and then I thought about fishing from a boat that burns the surface of the water away leaving the fish on the hot lakebed roasted and ready to eat. We would have to use olive oil for the fuel, pressurize it and spray it across the glassy surface, light it with a torch, maybe before we spray it we mix it with some capers and salt and pepper, then heat it to about 450 degrees and sprinkle with crushed flat leaf parsley, and bake the lake for about 30 minutes until the skin is golden brown, but you could lay them on a banana leaf in which case you rub the fish in a mixture of lime juice and salt and then serve on a bed of rice and coconut milk. This is naval war on the low seas and it has no Geneva Convention rules, as far as I know, but it does require a license and the ability to keep a secret under torture because once your friends smell those fish they will twist you like a dishrag and bend you so hard you enter four dimensions in three pieces until you confess the name of the lake that you were burning away. I was getting hungry and I swallowed at the sight of the salad of lawn clippings, the loaves of firewood in the woodshed by the old woman’s gingerbread house, all the while rubbing the hams of my hand, prodding the sugar sand, my hands shaking at the sight of the beer-colored foam. I wondered if they had food detoxification centers; I was ready for a relapse.
"Here?" Jack laughed. "Are you kidding? Not 'till we burn everything in sight."
I frowned. "You did that last night."
“No, not there." As he scanned the skies, the deck shoes sank into the green mud. "If you could see far away, up there beyond the scattered, brilliant, blue light that lettered men tell me lies above the endless clouds in this dreary, stratus opacus gloomscape you call home, they say that large stars will burn through sequences of fuel, starting with hydrogen, then, in succession, helium, carbon, neon, and oxygen." Two fish surfaced again. Or was it three. "In the last, they will burn silicon."
"And?" I watched the low clouds slink across the treetops like a grey cat.
"Silicon is last," he continued. "It takes about a day and it is gone. Once that is burned up, nothing can be fused, and within a second” – snapping his finger - “the star collapses. Just like that. Sometimes it explodes - a supernova." He scanned the skies again. "Out there. It's pretty, bright, and short-lived."
Like a fight, I thought, when the fist hits your temple and the whole world turns bright white.
"There is where is next."
"You say where? There?" I pointed at the grass.
"Right. At our feet are tiny palm-leaf villages with paper thin homes and sleeping inhabitants, the sly nematodes, brave arachnids, honorable springtails, dutiful dung beetles, cheery sowbugs, and millipedes, centipedes, slugs, and snails - regiments of hardy exoskeletal creatures which, were we reduced to their scale, would exterminate the whole race of us – revenge killings - each and every soft, pliable man, woman and child, using our gelatinous remains to grow bales of fungi that they would feed to their fertile queens."
That was no auroch I saw in the grass; it might have been a giant scarab beetle. I stroked my throat with my fingers. "I want to fight back."
"Sure." Jack gave me a nod. "We all do. They go about their day unaware, oblivious to what positions itself above them. And then we ambush them, dropping out of thin air. We attack these things with the same ruthlessness that we attacked enemy infantries of old as they marched across pastures and farmlands beneath happy, blue skies. The heavens opened up and we rained down vats of hot chemicals like brimstone and boiling oil and napalm." He kicked the grass. "Today, innovation and efficiency have created yet another superior product: we open the bomb bay doors on the enemy and unload a witch’s brew of hydrodynamic fronts, electromagnetic pulse, ionizing radiation and thermal flash." He paused. "The sky is the limit, son. If you can't compete in this marketplace, you have no place to be and no place being." He folded his arms and glared at the lawn.
A splash. There were those two fish – no three fish - again. They were fighting over something. But back to the lawn. "The lawn?"
“All my life this world has been a playground, my backyard. But there are only so many things to burn. We have gone through pine tar, saltpeter, naptha, quicklime, sulfur, niter and now plutonium." He pokes a dead bird on the shore with his shoe. "It's not 'What's next?' It's 'What's left?' Something is out there that is the silicon of this cold, iron stone that we live on."
“Maybe we already burned it.”
Jack turned his head toward me, squinting. He studied my face. His mouth was open and he wanted to say ‘What?’ but no words were coming out.
We stood looking at each other. A minute passed. I didn’t know what to say, he didn’t say anything. A hundred fish could have walked out of that river and set up communal living with the dung beetles and flatworms but we wouldn’t have noticed. “Jack?” My neck felt hot. Still no words, but I knew what he was trying to say. “Jack, I mean, I don’t know, maybe we used it up already.” I thought about that Labrador retriever barking at an empty squirrel’s nest in a dead tree in the winter at night by himself in an atmosphere depleted of oxygen and a blackened sun unable to give warmth or light. I think the dog was blind and deaf and a seizure was coming on. And I thought about beaches, that the beaches are covered in silicon. There is no end to sand. I find it in my clothes and shoes and food. It blows and carves out rock sculptures and it stacks a thousand feet high in deserts and buries ancient cities. They say the number of stars exceeds the grains of sand on earth. Hourglasses are filled with sand and the glass is made of sand. If you burn sand it turns to glass. I didn’t know what to think. My eyes focused on Jack but he was gone, heading up toward the old woman’s house. “Jack. Hey. Hey, where you going?”
“The old woman.”
There was that splash again. A fish chomped onto a bleach bottle, shook it back and forth and pulled it underwater. A sound, like sloop and a few bubbles and it was gone. Two minutes later bits of plastic rose to the surface and then some large bubbles. Alligators do the same thing; they shake the victim, drag it underwater, dismember it and drown it. Or is it the other way around. That’s when I noticed that the sand at my feet was very big. It was mixed with millions of bits of broken plastic bottles, oxidized, irradiated, abraded, and I was standing on a semi-man-made beach, very colorful. Too much quartz to call it an unspoiled, anthropogenic man-scape, but give it a few more years, just a few more years of this synthetic saturation-bombing, this mad-chemistry, and imagine what it would look like. And two-hundred years in the future, why, with all the sand washed away - it was going to be pristine, pure, a breathtaking polymeric paradise. A thousand automatons in a laboratory somewhere turned their faces toward me and smiled.
Eons beyond, into the distant future, after a zillion floods and channel diversions, and tectonics elevated the landscape upstream an additional two-thousand feet above sea level, this old beach would be buried beneath a thousand feet of debris. Then, some sunbaked paleontologist would unearth the hardened strata and, wafting away the chlorinated outgasses with an old, cotton towel, find my fossilized footprints and declare me primitive man. I could see the vestigial fingers on my left hand fumbling with the vestigial fingers on my right and I could not bear to look. Rudimentary, degenerate, like fat, pink crayons. Stop it. I turned away. They might as well have been hooves. But I had to wonder just what they were doing. I had no ready answers. And yet, this thought did not stop them from doing whatever it was that they were doing over and over again and for a moment I considered tossing one of them away for simplicity. This is not where I wanted things to go and I quickly rubbed my footprint out with my left foot. Wilderness ethics, Leave no trace, right? Of course, the right foot quickly made a new footprint and I knew I could not control my feet either. I could see an automaton in the lab, smiling and I was hot with jealousy.
Upstream somewhere, tiny particles of quartz sloughed off in the raging battle between water and rock and drifted downstream. The sales pitch is that plastics are maintenance free, no thought or effort required, and soon I was going to fit right in just like -
A splash. The fish broke the surface, snagged a plastic bag out of the air and cut back into the river and I swore it had three heads.
At that moment, I heard Jack shout as he ran back from the house. “Hey! I had to ask the lady. I had to ask her what she did with all the sweaters.”
He beat me to it; I had always wanted to ask her that question. “And?”
“She said, ‘What sweaters?’ I thought she was being coy, so I said, ‘I know how you’ve helped so, so many unfortunate souls. What’ve you done with all the sweaters you’ve made over the years?’ She said, ‘I only make this one. Only this one.’ I said, ‘But what about the others?’”
Words jumped out of my mouth, “Charity, she must have given them to charity.” Come on, lady, I thought, Say you gave them to charity.
Jack took a breath. “Then she said it again, ‘I only make this one, only this one.’ I don’t get what she means. And so I looked closer, and I see that she was taking the sweater apart, unraveling it knit by purl, one knit by one purl, one knit by one purl. And then her hands, they are calloused like a sailor’s and full of Gordian knots and pock marks, like yellow golf balls melted together. And then she said - get this: ‘And when I am done, I only make this one again, only this one, and when I am done I only make this one again, only this one, and when I am done...’ She kept saying that over and over and over and I see she is going to make that sweater all over again and I had to get out of there so I jumped up and ran out the back door.” He wiped the sweat from his forehead. "I didn't see this. Did I really see this? This is uncharted territory.”
“I don’t know, I don’t know.” We stared the house. “What is she doing?”
His body leaned slightly, away from the house. “Let’s get out of here.”
I looked up. It was almost noon but it was still a dreary grey. I felt like we were being watched. Maybe it was the old woman, maybe someone else. I didn’t know. I looked at the river. Then the treetops. I could barely speak. “Jack. Look." I pointed. "Those aren’t clouds up there. It's smoke. All this time it’s been smoke.”

Bedtime Story

2011-12-09T01:24:00.000-08:00

My first floor windows on the east side of my house had an excellent view of the first floor windows on the west side of my neighbor's house. The view was so complete that, while I sat in my living room in my reading chair by the east window, I could yawn and stretch my left arm and reach into his living room and trade books. If only for the window screens. The same was true on the west side but I did not care for her cheap romance novels.

One brilliant and wrathfully hot Wednesday morning, just shy of noon, I was sitting in the shade cheerfully swatting a breed of imported flies when Henry, my neighbor to the east, came down the sidewalk toward my patch of lawn carrying a box. Henry walked his way around town, having no car or license. He said that he couldn't drive because he was myopic, but his wife said that he was gloomy. He was whistling again. My ears stood straight up like a dog's. I rose in my chair. "Stop it, will you?" He glanced my way. He was in the third bar of some byzantine, baroque fugue in descending minor that was elevating my blood pressure. "I said stop it. Can't you find something else to do with that excess windage and fattened tongue besides misinterpret Vituperatio or Balooney or Paparazzi or whomever it is you mock?"

He stopped right in the arc of the lawn sprinkler. "I whistle when I am tense. I've got to shed some excess nerves." The sprinkler swept across his back. "Yow - cold!" He jumped aside.

"Well shed them in the fall so they can blow down to Alabama with the rest of the litter on my lawn." I nearly stood up to impress, but I was really hoping that he would pass along too quickly for me to rise. "Anyhow, what's the angst about now?" Never a day passed without his complaint about his nerves.

He looked at me sideways. "Job applications." He had been unemployed for about two years and was looking for work.
I relaxed in the chair. "Any leads?" I looked down at the ants crawling across the driveway that sizzled in the hot sun, tar oozing from the cracks like black summer sweat. The ants would make it about an arm's length into the driveway and then overheat and swell and turn on their backs and then die, legs outstretched. And many of the dead were rescue teams sent to recover the remains of the first casualties. Carcasses piled up. Maybe this was a plan; they would use the dead as bridges to the netherworld on the other side of the driveway where all wood was soggy with rot and the aphids were plump. I looked across the shimmering asphalt and saw ants on the other side working their way toward this side in the same fashion. I wondered what it must have felt like to be on a suicide mission to save another suicide mission that is on a mission to save you.
He shrugged again. "Well, I figure with all my experience applying for jobs, I could get a job looking at applications for job openings. They call it a Personnel Director."
I thought of Russian Nesting Dolls eating one another.
He saw my blank look. "I was interviewed for an opening in personnel at the airport today."
I raised my eyebrows. He looked away. "How did it go?"
He started whistling.
"Hey - "
"Sorry. I was relaxing." He looked at the box of papers. "They tested me today. They had me review applications for job openings for pilots." He paused and looked down and slowly shook his head. "I don't know. I don't get it."
"Get what?" I swatted at a fly that landed on my arm. It was about as big as a half dollar, glittering blue and green like a Vegas hotel with a rack of antennae that would have made a trophy elk run in fear.
He shook the box. "All the applicants were schoolchildren, from Mrs. William's second grade class. Some of the applications just had pictures drawn in crayon. Food stains. Ripped. Crumpled. I don't get it."
I smiled. "Were they qualified?"
His face curled slightly. "That's what I don't get. I was told that they were serious candidates." There he stood, sweating, dehydrating in the hot white sun, losing weight, height and volume, holding a box of crayon drawings of stick men created by the brightest leaders of tomorrow, and tomorrow would begin in precisely 12 hours, coincidentally, the very moment when our world would be at its darkest.
I began to whistle.
Henry tipped his head to the side. "You sound myopic."
I got up and went into the house.
At about ten at night - it must have been ten o'clock because the news was on television and panels of pale men with swollen necks and carnivorous women with dilated pupils dressed in business suits were championing in great detail personal versions of a future reality in ever increasing volume and cacophony. Like a cage full of parrots. About ten at night I sat down to watch the news.
Henry looked out his window into my window. He was watching the same program, or maybe he wasn't because the background colors were different. "I am watching an action movie."
"No you aren't. It's the news."
He looked at his television. "Nah, it's an action movie. You're wrong."
"No, you are wrong."
"It has to be. At the end of this there is always a loud explosion and bodies fly all over the place and the next day I go see the sequel and I see the same set of actors scrubbed and cleaned and powdered do it all over again."
I picked up a book on the end table and tried to read but I forgot that the pages went from left to right and besides, I read it several years earlier. It was a science fiction novel from the 1950's entitled The Eyestorm, about a future that is now long past, one where everyone drives a flying car, motivational music is omnipresent, the moon is cultivated, communities are arranged vertically, and the state wages war against every second thought. Well, I had misgivings about the book when I opened it, but I was afraid to put it down and finished it in a few hours. Afterward, I closed the blinds on the windows.
"See?" Henry pointed at the screen and there was chaos and shouting and the camera cut away to a commercial. "See?"
On the west side of the house I could hear the other neighbor reading a bedtime story to her daughter. I think she read it every Wednesday evening, a book called The Big Red Airplane. The heroine, a young girl named Darcy, takes the controls of a big red airplane when the pilot oversleeps and she flies it around the world so many times that they go forward in time and find a civilization where everyone is literate and animals have rights and houses talk to you and, sure enough, they have flying cars, and the President calls on Darcy to save the city from a family of angry asteroids by sending the asteroids back in time so they miss the earth. This reminds me why I sit on the east side of the house. I had half-a-mind to tell that daughter the real story, and I made sure I let her mother know that I had half-a-mind - and she agreed - and I was fully determined to tell her that the civilization that Darcy saved went on to revoke the rights of animals so that they could use them to fuel their flying cars and all the people could read alright, but became immersed in abject sloth and bliss and their ability to write and create atrophied - but this condition didn't last long because their immune systems were no match for the mutant bacteria that were out-gassing from the genetics laboratories. Besides, the President was the one that sent the asteroids so he could declare a State of Emergency and force a social contract whereby the citizens would give up their inalienable rights in exchange for virtual reality, libations, and the pursuit of pleasure. Darcy was just a pawn and died in prison with hundreds of other children held for their charming, little beliefs.
That was about three years ago. She only recently unlocked her first floor window and opened the drapes.
Henry was still watching the news. He looked over. "You know, these men and women on this show look like they are aware and sentient and lucid. One would imagine they had a conscience."
"So?" I looked at the newspaper. A headline read, "Scientists Discover Royal Family Is Genetically Identical to Sausage Links".
Henry continued. "Really, they all use abstract terms and assert their moral certitude. It's a good movie."
"Would you quit calling it a movie! It's not a show, it's a discussion, experts finding solutions."
"That's a good movie." Henry leaned back in his chair and took a swig of water. "I am cheering for the fat fellow on the left there. See him? He can really act. I am almost convinced he really believes he has solutions."
I looked past him at the television. It was a different channel, but they had the same position players, one aging wise man, a blonde woman with sharp eyebrows, a dark-eyed man with a cherubic face, smart haircut, dark hair clipped above the ears and parted on the side. Another puffy, arteriosclerotic man with thick jowls and bulging eyes who sweated and lost his temper first. Once he lost it, the others followed. That was the explosive climax. I think I saw a headline go across the screen about an asteroid.
Henry tapped on the window screen. "Hey. Lincoln said that the legitimate object of a government is to do for a community of people whatever they need to have done, but cannot do for themselves in their separate and individual capacities."
He said it too fast for me to catch it all. "What?"
He watched the experts shouting above each other. "I am saying that we need more than single-issue Messiahs. I mean, we have five-thousand and seventy-nine critical issues we need to solve simultaneously. One for every man, woman, and child on earth and all these folks can do is shout simultaneously."
I still had trouble hearing him over the din.
He placed his drink on the end table. Moths hit the screens between us. "Unfortunately, Lincoln had to bathe and eat and take naps and comfort his wife and retrieve the keys he misplaced in the icebox and hang out with his relatives when they brought 'possum from Illinois and then go sleep for eight or ten hours and then miss an appointment with the ambassador to Spain because he forgot about it and his teeth were aching oh-so-badly that he had to put down more corn whiskey than he was accustomed to and that was where the Vice President would step in, if only they could wake him up from his slumber after being up all night playing poker with the Speaker of the House and the Secretary of State. They say he lost his shirt and redistricting in Vermont."
The television switched to breaking news from somewhere. Headlines and war scenes appeared. "Peace Marchers Set Fire to Nursing Home."
Henry looked at me. "Are you listening, bud?" I gave a vague shrug. "Think about it: What was Gandhi's policy on health care? What did MLK have to say about child slavery? What did Cyrus the Great think about drug resistant pathogens? And Peter the Great, I wonder what his platform was on groundwater depletion? I suppose that man had the time to come up with something." He looked back at the television. "Yeah, great show."
"Maybe it is, but maybe they are lost in the character and really are what they appear to be."
"For enough money, anyone will be what they are not. These people make a living convincing people they are someone other than themselves." He leaned back and ran his fingers through his hair. "Nah. They will sort things out when they hand out the Emmy Awards." He pointed at the screen. "Well for the love of Pete..." A headline appeared: "Aurora Borealis More Active Around Pet Cemeteries."
Before I could think I blurted, "I believe that!" I backed into my chair. "I mean, I think I have seen that happen in Rosemont, along Highway 63." I looked at the end table. Seven dead flies were on the table. One was caught in the glass housing around the lamp and was burning alive.
"And the show goes on." Henry turned off the television. "I mean, this Machiavellian landscape is overpopulated with also-rans, thugs, megalomaniacs, sycophants, honyokers, and ruffians, many of which are engaged in such villainous acts of compulsive-destructive behavior that new problems at created at such a rate that they outstrip the ability of all the genetic laboratories in the earth to produce cloned Gandhi-like figures in numbers equal to the task."
I raised my hand. "But maybe they could appear to be up to the task. That would at least create security, right?"
I don't think he heard me or maybe he did. Moths swirled in the lamplight like snow. He continued, "Let's be fair. Maybe one of these leaders could multitask. So let's ask, What was Julius Caesar's policy on alternative fuels, nuclear waste, habitat destruction, species extinction, petroleum based farming, corporate greed, internet pornography, school violence, the drug trade, wetland loss, factory farms, consumerism, hyperinflation, quantitative easing, landfill seepage, racism, and the weapons trade? Oh, and I forgot, failing infrastructure. I want to see his mission statement too. By tomorrow at the end of the business day. Four copies please. And it had better make sense. No gimmicks. Consistent, integrated, no contradictions, comprehensive and fully funded. Leave it on my desk."
I laughed. "Don't bet on it. He probably has to take a powder and rehearse his lines."
He nodded. "Yeah, but I hear he has a great smile and a full head of hair."
I sighed and sunk back into my chair, relaxed. "Man, I am glad these folks aren't real. If they were we would be doomed." I looked at the clock. "Hey, it's already midnight."

Civil War

2011-11-02T02:20:00.000-07:00

This is what is war.
I had read that politicians and their wives sat upon the hilltops overlooking the Occoquan River to watch the first battle of the Civil War, the Battle of Bull Run or Manassas. They imagined that they were going to have a picnic. This was about 150 years ago. The battle turned and they abandoned the hilltops and fled for their lives.
The fellow sitting at the counter next to me was staring into his coffee cup. He shook his head. "I saw glowing cats in the shelterbelt behind my house."
"What?" The smoke over the Occoquan valley vanished and I looked at his face, pale, loose and baggy like the skin on a rotting gourd. I smiled. "Maybe it was marsh gas, Will-O-The-Wisp. You know. Blue flames."
"No, they were cats. I see them every fall. They herd up at this time of the year, forming a defensive alignment - like Musk Oxen. The females are on the outer edge, facing outward, hissing, protecting their young."
"Where are the menfolk?" I wiped my mouth with the napkin, the one with a phone number I had intended to keep, but blue cats absorbed my thoughts and the napkin was taken away by the waitress.
He looked up, bewildered, his mouth open, exposing toast and eggs. There were no words.
I signaled the waitress, slid five dollars across the counter, excused myself, put on my hat, and stepped out onto the sidewalk. His eyes followed me out the door. I looked up and down the road. It was a small town: one grocery, one gasoline station, one bank, one florist, one funeral home and one beauty salon. I think it was a beauty salon - named Prairie Hair Design. Huh. I wondered if they did prescribed burns. Out walked a woman with blue hair. Is that - ?
A wildland fire usually has one point of origin: a lightning strike, a spark from a railroad car, a runaway campfire, an overheated muffler, a branch on a power line. From above, the boundaries of the fire have a teardrop shape, expanding outward from the point of origin, much like the outline of an island in a river or a patterned peatland. Forensics at the point of origin can determine the cause of the fire. So, working backwards to the point of origin it might be possible to determine the cause of all of the puffy hairdos with blue rinse in the community. Was it a stray lightning strike? Hot cinders tossed by a passing rail car? A gust of wind on the unattended campfire? A branch across two high voltage transmission lines? I figure that's why beauticians go to school for cosmetology; the occupational hazards are formidable and one needs rigorous safety training before setting up shop and releasing all of these chemically-altered fur bearers into the public arena.
But the line between cosmetology and cosmology is a fine one, as is the line between cosmology and astrology, and this transitivity supports my suspicion that the whole business of hair repair and maintenance is simply a superstitious act, like divining the future from the marks on one's hand or witching water with a willow twig or tossing a black cat over one's shoulder or walking beneath a cracked mirror. They strut out of the salon and onto this same sidewalk, puffy and proud, coming toward me with their glowing blue auras. Eager to meet the future. You will meet a dark and handsome stranger today! Luck awaits you around the corner! New experiences will happen to you and emotional connections await! And that lucky stranger just might be me. This mob, why, it looked like a herd of glowing cats. There they were. This set me in the opposite direction, toward the outskirts of town.
The town is surrounded by shortgrass hills, plain and featureless, like a beige wool sport-coat. A side slope overlooking the village has a pile of whitewashed rocks assembled in the form of a large letter "A", the first letter of the village name. It is visible for miles around and to the occasional light plane that might drift overhead, on its way to dust crops. The rocks were moved from the crest of the hill to the side slope a half-century ago by boys from the high school. It was an afternoon outing, a break from classroom studies, a community project. None of the boys noticed the that the rocks they were moving had been arranged in seven circles on the hill crest. Nobody noticed the flakes of black flint scattered around the rim of the hill. The teacher was busy staking out the edges of the letter. One boy found an arrowhead. He put it in his pocket; every kid had an arrowhead collection. Another boy pulled a coffee-colored leg bone out of the soft clay on the western edge of the hill. The teacher shouted and they both trotted back to the group. The letter was constructed and they marched down the hill and back to the school. They admired it from below. "You will be remembered for this as long as those rocks are there," said the teacher. Every year since, a group of students have marched back up that hill to repaint and readjust the rocks.
A century earlier, seven families would set up camp on this hilltop, using the rocks to hold down the skirts of their lodges. They had been doing this as long as they could remember and the keepers of oral history said that their ancestors had been doing it since the day they emerged from the Hole in the earth. The River was visible to the camp and they would venture down to the sandbars and riverbanks each day to trade and to visit. They thought it would last forever.
Well, the village came, bringing forever to an end. The valley where the village was built was in the opposite direction of the River, at the base of the hills. The seven families abandoned the hill.
On the way to that hill, I passed the fellow I talked to at the cafe. "I can't get the cats out of my head," he said, shaking his head like he had wasps in his ears.
"I am trying to forget." I kept on a fast pace, walking up-slope toward the crest of the hill. I could hear him swatting the air behind me and arguing with cats. I raced up the hill and reached the crest, spotted with yucca and sandstone blocks and granite glacial erratics. Standing behind the letter A, near the missing stone circles, I turned and looked down on the village. Cars and pedestrians worked the sidewalks and streets below.
I don't think it would be possible to get too far away from anything in a town like this. Here, the mortician is the beautician's husband, and nobody seems to know the difference, the banker is the brother of the chief of police who has a key to the vault, the Mayor owns the saloon where the pastor moonlights as the bartender so long as he doesn't tell the Mayor's wife anything about his visits, the church group meets in back of the grocery store and sings songs about sin with hearty vigor, and no wonder, they were celebrating the communion with the same brand of wine they drank at the saloon the night before and were singing the same songs they sang that night - with some alterations at the end of the final verse to express penance and sorrow for the backsliding ways expressed in the first verse - and the florist works nights as a nursing assistant at the hospital (her flower arrangements are slightly used), the gasoline station owner runs an insurance agency from his garage, the same garage where he keeps the fire truck, and the ambulance driver is the mortician, never known to speed. This place is everywhere. As the village grows into a city, the connections multiply and mutate and suddenly, it exceeds our natural limitations and simultaneously it exceeds our ability to understand it. A new class of merchants arise, those that ply statistical approximations and primitive, mathematical models to describe our new, self-replicating, autonomous reality, all of which fall desperately short. It is Dystopia, where industrial output of ignorance and error is growing nine-percent a year and everyone has a manufacturing job. In this environment, we don't even recognize our own children.
Thus, you bounce a check at the grocery store and you may end up getting a fatal manicure in a burning church.
At that moment, I recall that I think that I recalled that phone number. It was the number for the mortician. No, the beautician. Or was it the mortician. Ah, what's the difference? It's a thin line between a mortician and a beautician; the difference is the vigor of your client. I think. I know that one or both or neither of them wanted me for something or maybe not for something. That is for sure.
Man, I thought it would be a picnic, being up on that hill, but things turned out far, far worse than anyone could have expected. That I will remember for a long time.

Dante Was Here

2011-10-02T20:46:00.000-07:00

The other day someone bumped into me on the subway and slipped a list of questions into my coat pocket. I found them later that morning when I reached into the pocket to pull out the obituary section. I was looking for a story about a man who disappeared and was never seen again. The thirteenth question read: "What are you doing here?" I thought, that was hours and miles ago; I am not doing anything where I am not anymore.

There are questions that leave me awake at night, staring at the ceiling in a cold sweat, and there are other questions that lull me to sleep to dream about lying awake at night staring at the ceiling in a cold sweat thinking about questions. I try not to think of either at any time, but it is like asking someone to raise his hand if he can't hear you.
This night, there I was, looking up at the ceiling again, trying to picture what it is that I am doing somewhere at sometime, but all I could see was darkness. I couldn't see my own hand in front of my own face if I had tried and for a certainty, if it were not my hand I wouldn't have known the difference. And it wouldn't matter, I would still try to swat it away, swat it away like one's arm when it has fallen asleep and drapes across one's abdomen heavy and wet. That's the arm that keeps returning back to its place no matter how many times you swat it away, like a mad dog on a short leash, like that check you wrote last week, like the memory of the war you fought. This is a handicap. Once again, as I dispute the origins and validity of my own hand, I miss the opportunity to come to experience just what it is that I do, and cannot answer questions that only I can ask. I may have simply disappeared. I fold the paper and the names it contains are forgotten.
Or so I think. I squint at the ceiling a little more and there I see tiny space ships moving across the blackness trailing banners with the answers to these questions, but now they are in an ancient script and I can't make out a thing. It is then I realize that all the while I have been outside on a high meadow lying in my sleeping bag next to a dwindling campfire and those lights up there are real space ships. XXM, Vorsted, VRM, ROSAT, Amos. I shake my head: but I am certain that I am imagining the banners. That illusion is true. It is very late and I need to put out the campfire and go to sleep. The northern lights sweep across the sky like the tail of a mountain lion. A meteor makes a paper cut in the sky, bleeding white for a split second, then the black skin of night heals over. After eons of this, you might think that the the night sky would be so scarred it would look like African body art, but night absorbs all wounds. So I sleep. As I nod off, one of the ships reenters the atmosphere at a sharp angle and ignites, sparkly yellow and green and then it disappears. Two days later, as I sat in a cafe eating vulcanized bacon wedgettes with bleached, androgynous eggs and oriented-strand toast, the newspaper headline reads, "Space Junk Reenters Atmosphere and Burns up over Denver. Millions Misinterpret Sign." I guess slept right through it.
The morning in the meadow brings the sun into the open like a loud brass band. I shield my eyes. What am I doing here anyhow? Somebody once told me that we just aren't meant to know, and I told him not to share his personal problems with me anymore. I mean, answering questions about ecology, niche, habitat, associated species, soil type or slope, these are academic and ordinary. Anyone can create a postulate or theory and then assemble supporting data. Go ahead and try. Repeat after me: I postulate that... Now fill in the blank and then apply for a grant. Go ahead. I postulate that army worms caused the First World War. I postulate that decreased rainfall increases religious behavior. Speech intolerance is a reliable predictor of the ability to navigate hedge mazes. Banking security is a function of shareholder disorientation. All parental superstitions are traced to one town crier in France. It's easy. The library shelves have a random and highly disordered assemblage of yellowing journals filled with lofty, mathematical prose, which journals reproduce asexually and can do so in an oxygen-depleted environment. Doctoral dissertations and coauthors and peer review and coefficients of correlation. Yes. Orthogonal two-component experiential hyperbole. Somewhere in there lies ecology and niche and soil type. So I have a theory: What I am is not in there.

So maybe my business is just plain-old Agoraphobia, a fear of going out into crowds of people. An uncontrolled social situation from which there is no escape.
And this assumes that one can actually escape from uncontrolled social situations. It may not be possible. I think that they are universal and all pervasive, sort of like some sort of Zen state, all-one with all. Or one. Or something. Well then, I must be in The Urbanite's Hell: The past four months I have been drifting, just migrating across the open fields like a herd of antelope, on a sea like a rudderless ship, floating through air like a paper airplane, a leaf on a breezy lake, a blind man looking for something to see. Through savannas and black forests of pine, up claystone slopes and down sagebrush swales, meanders along drowsy clear rivers, slogs through soggy black ash bottomlands where every step sinks into the floodplain silt and releases mosquitoes into the air like telegraph messages, pointing into my thighs. Ten thousand at at time, dive bombers, sacrificing their lives for the nation. Could I send one back, half-alive, to warn the others? If reincarnation were true, I would be a mass murderer.
How many levels are there to this hell, nine? The cold air collects on the hillsides in the evening and merges in the draws. By the time it reaches the river bottom, it is nearly a breeze, and it forms a fog that drifts away from shore like a daydream. It is scented with wet grass and turpenes from the ponderosa pine, sweet like tangerines and clove. I have entered another savanna. This is Level One.
The Second Level is finding a pine that looks just like a ponderosa pine on another continent. Level Three is finding that the two pines are genetically similar and that, although they are isolated by time and space, they can actually interbreed, albeit with assistance. Level Four is sharing this with your friends. Level Five is having your friends reply that the sedges and grasses beneath the pines on one continent are not the same as those on the other continent and that they have a completely different function in relation to the pine and that the niche that the grasses and sedges occupy on the other continent are unique and require further study because nobody thought of that niche before and hey, they forgot to tell you that studies have shown that humans have a widespread and ubiquitous preference for natural environments, particularly savannas but also they gravitate toward lakeshores and seashores and sometimes dark forests and more often than not will build civilizations around these natural spots and, by the way, they also forgot to tell you that studies show that the urban environment is shown to have a causal relationship with mental illness. Level Six is the realization that everything you knew up until now was wrong, but something tells you that you had better stay put in this grassy, open woodland, so help you God, Level Seven is the realization that the design in nature is infinitely more complex than anything you could ever imagine from here to eternity, and Level Eight is the realization that the land management program that you worked on with a panel of fifty experts for the past ten years and implemented last week set in motion a series of irreversible and catastrophic natural events that will ultimately lead to the extinction of all life on earth. You probably won't share this with your friends.
Very few people make it to the Ninth Level. After all, one man's hell is another man's paradise.

Ghost in the Darkness

2011-09-19T23:16:00.000-07:00

There is a wind out on the meadow. It whistles through the bones of a bird, hollow like drinking straws, a pneumatic system, bellows pumping air that keeps the frame bloated and aloft. It sings. Then a gust carries the bird away. I look at my notepad. I had something to write down but I lost it.

It is a cloudy, low sky. Wind and water are fundamentally clear, but you add smoke or clay or condensation and they each become visible. It's like putting a radio collar on a suspect bear or radioactive dye in the bloodstream. The suspended substance gives it a form and you can track it across a matrix. But it's still not wind or water.
Sometimes it doesn't matter. The bear circles a sheep herd in the foothills at night and you can watch it move in and out of the herd carrying off one course of a meal after another, a feast, a banquet of mutton - all in the comfort of a climate controlled office in the northern Rocky Mountains. I think about that office and wonder what heat used to feel like.
I want to tie a rope to the bird. Before the taming of the electric current, a sheep herder would have to recognize the shape and space and color of the eyes in the firelight. Two red dots four inches apart. Two blue dots that don't move. Two green ones that move up and down. Quick. Which one is the sheep. Which one is the bear. Which is the reflection of the moon. Which one is the camp cook. A shot into the dark could mean hot bear steaks tonight or prison meals for life. It is at this point in time that the herder, his face raining sweat and eyes wide like egg whites, conceived the idea of radio telemetry and was about to broadcast it to his two friends staring into the woods, but, alas, was unable to expound due an unfortunate combination of poor night vision, wind, rain, and simple miscalculation. Three bears, not one. This is what we call circumstances beyond one's control. Too bad. Under the same circumstances the bears easily recognized the well-fed sheep herders.
The vast majority of humans were rural dwellers in centuries gone by; some 95% in the United States in the 1790's. They were villagers with stone or wood or animal skin dwellings and few dozen family units and surrounding fields with livestock and beyond it, a vast wilderness. This was an unknown wilderness, really, known no more than the accidental provisions that spilled out from it into the village: the occasional elk, the flock of grouse overhead, the swarm of bees, the creek that passed between the fields. Many villages were surrounded by barricades of pointed stakes or stone walls and armed men posted in watchtowers. This wilderness entered by invitation only. At night, when something moved in the darkness the men would fire guns, shoot arrows, toss spears, throw rocks...even their own children. At daybreak they would venture out into the bush and find blood-soaked sand and drag marks. A wounded or dead animal was carried away by something much, much larger. The talk would spread and convolute and quickly the animals would become unimaginably large. Great, horned beasts with claws and toothed jaws that ate entire mountains and breathed fire and ate women and children by the thousands.
Today, it's the other way around. The vast majority of humans are urban dwellers; some 75% in the United States live in cities. These are still walled cities, with stone fortresses and watchtowers with heavily armed men. But the wilderness is proportionately smaller: quaint, little fenced rectangles, like schoolyards, with a sharp, razor-tipped line between the civilized and wilderness lands that can be seen from 800 miles in space. And the forest that was never known is now simply unidentifiable: a scrubby, worm-eaten corpse with tilting trees, pock marked stumps, inbred wildlife, sunken aquifers, tailing piles, herds of feral cats, toxic stains, windblown plastic, severed corridors, and an understory of wiry invaders and genetically-modified mysteries that coil around the last remnants of the original forest.
There is a rustling in the woods tonight. Quickly, the menfolk grab their guns and fire into the darkness. Guns on turrets with fifty caliber shells and thousand-pound bombs with jellied gasoline and dioxin and benzene and plutonium. The smoke drifts back into the city and burns the eyes. An air-quality alert goes out. In the morning the men venture into the bush and find the remains of something unrecognizable; tufts of fir, or is it feathers. Maybe it's a mammal. Probably a bird. Who knows. Who knew. Who would ever know.
I suspect that the animal probably recognized us before it vanished. It's probably true: Something is here that is larger than we can imagine, something monstrous, a great, horned beast with claws and toothed jaws that eats entire mountains and breathes fire and eats men and women and children and living things by the thousands.

Foreshortening

2011-09-16T02:20:00.000-07:00

As a man walks away from you he becomes smaller than your outstretched hand. If you look around, there are a lot of things that were very big that have become small for one reason or another. Like Y2K. Atom-bomb shelters. Prohibition. Fur trade. Knee screws. So it is a little unsettling to think that I am shrinking in the distance myself, that is, according to people who see me getting smaller and had the notion to tell me before I disappeared altogether, sort of like the last, desperate protestation of love between a man and a woman at a train station in the few seconds before the conductor says "all aboard". The hands break apart and the fingers reach out to touch but the distance grows until the hand disappears and all that remains is the plume of coal smoke on the horizon.
You wait long enough and the memory disappears too.
It can feel like fatality, this departure, or maybe it's the other way around. The difference is the reason for the disappearance. When one disappears without warning, as might happen when abducted by anthropologists or duped at a card game into taking a monastic vow of silence or when becoming too absorbed in doing the math in one's head or when falling into severe and prolonged existentialism, it feels the same. I had a friend who disappeared that way once. I saw her reflection in a storefront window and I turned to look at her and a bus passed between us and she was gone. I think that is what happened. Her name escapes me. She had blonde, no red hair.

The other day, while in search of vanishing species on the north central grasslands, I came across a cemetery. It was a quaint prairie cemetery guarded by wrought iron fences on the south and a depression-era windbreak of Siberian elm and Black Hills spruce on the north, east. In the European custom, the graves all lay feet facing east, luxury suites with a fabulous view of the early morning sky to the east, so it is said. The oldest graves had fallen into disrepair, no flowers to be seen, the names and dates were weathered, and many were toppled. Someone had taken the time to recast the names on little iron plates staked in the grass, but that person did their work decades ago and, I suppose, they lay amongst the headstones somewhere, rubbing elbows with old friends. Today, their names escape us, faint etchings mottled with lichen and moss.
As I walked away, I turned to look and it got smaller and smaller until it disappeared from view. Now I can't even remember where the place was.

So ends another summer. Oak savannas, black ash swamps, sagebrush and badlands, lodgepole pine and Douglas fir. Ponderosa pine, thick red trunks and deep, almost black boughs. Sturdy grasses and sagebrush so tall that it imagines itself a tree, so long as it doesn't get near one, which isn't likely, seeing that most trees in North Dakota are in museums. And sandstone caprocks huddled over strata like a child over a cereal bowl; don't touch what's underneath. And we wouldn't for a long time.
Well, the long time came to an end. We exited the age of Enlightenment, enthralled with our own wisdom and might, and took the new found liberty and knowledge and created the Industrial Age, which continues to this day. Now some may say, No, it ended when we entered the Technological Age or the Information Age or the New Age or the Styrofoam Age or the Corn Syrup Age or Sectional Couch Age or whatever it is now, but half the globe has yet to see an industry in their backyard yet. Untapped resources and new markets, my boy. This has to change and change it will.
Sometimes we go to the store and the sign says, "New and Improved", and we put it in the washing machine and the clothes still come out with grass stains and ring-around-the-collar and the mothers look cross and the kids look downcast. All that was new and improved was the lettering on the box, those words New and Improved. So it is with the Industrial Age: We have taken the old machinery from the Dark Ages, the knee screw, the iron collar, the rack, the branks, the garotte, and put a label "New and Improved" and hawked it to nuclear families around the western world. Only this time, we wouldn't dare use them on the heretical masses; they learned to read and write. So we applied them to inanimate objects, ones that can't complain or riot or call lawyers or write great declarations of inanimate object rights. And we applied them to unintelligent brutes, from the great apes on down to lobsters.
As I leave, I can see the hills recede from view, hills brushed red with tussocks of little bluestem and moist valleys of ash and elm and wild plum, with flocks of sharptail grouse bursting from buffaloberry thickets and nighthawks sweeping the skies in the late evening and a luscious full moon, tomato-red from forest fires to the west. I am becoming a dot on the horizon, a distant memory, someday forgotten altogether, like the folks in the prairie cemetery. But today, the long time has come: The caprocks and soil mantle and grassland carpet are being pulled away by medieval machines, the modern-day Brodequin, Strappado, Judas Cradle, Heretic's Fork, and Iron Maiden. The riches are exposed and angry, desperate, confused, trembling crowds gather and plunder them. They light fires to burn what remains.
As I disappear, I look back and I see nothing. It occurs to me that we both disappear at the same time and someday, there will be nobody left to remember a thing.

The Circle of Death

2011-09-04T22:55:00.000-07:00

There is a loud train outside of my window. I suppose it is filled with hot, steaming coal from some strip mine in Wyoming, but it is too dark to tell right now. It blends into the night. The thing thunders by, the cabin shakes, and it blows its horn. Why blow the horn here? Maybe fifty years ago, when people lived in this town, working at the sawmill, but today, I think the only people left are buried behind a church. The ground behind the church shakes but nobody knows a thing.
As always, I am a moment away from joining in their silent vigil. In fact, sitting here, I am living in a space not much bigger than a coffin. And I don't know much more than they do. So the line between us grows thinner. At least my space has a window, although it is barely large enough to squeeze through. This is an advantage when the thing squeezing through is trying to get into the vehicle rather than out.

A fly fisherman three miles upstream bumped into a grizzly.

This is recreational vehicle life. I think I understand, as I see seventy year old men around me in white knee socks and baggy shorts and feed hats with military slogans and toy poodles and stories about the glories of war. I have no such stories, but being here, I make up stories about life on the open range. The blizzard of '49 that swallowed up our town and we had to dig a tunnel all the way to Texas to find daylight. Branding cattle in a pouring rainstorm with two broken arms, a case of typhoid, all the while fighting off eight wolves and seven rustlers. Mom was too busy tending the milk cows to give birth so the kids all borned themselves. Putting water in the Bank because it was the only valuable thing we had. Going without air for a summer because dad said so, besides, it was too thick to breathe it anyhow. Times were tough but we rode it out. Can't say that for peoples nowadays.

Anyhow, there are fires in the mountains tonight. Dry lightning they call it. Where the storm doesn't send rain, it sends lightning. It's virgo, where the rain evaporates before it reaches the ground. So the lightning hits an old dry log in the pine forest. Pine, just a form of hard gasoline, if you ask me. Then the log smoulders for a day or a week. And then one hot, dry day, the humidity drops as the temperature goes up and at 1:43 in the afternoon, the log bursts into flames. The trees above it catch some of the fire and carry it into the canopy and it races across the treetops like a long haired sunburned surfer. A child of the stylized Sun seen in children's picture books.

The smoke today looked like the wall cloud of a thunderstorm. But it wasn't blue or black, it was orange, brown, like dust; it could have been mistaken as dust by a homesteader. All day long the smell of rich roasted pine was in the air, sweet, like pipe tobacco, and at this intensity, as alluring as fresh coffee grounds. Maybe it is nicotene in the air. Maybe it is instinctive hunger, the sense that there is a porterhouse steak somewhere out there on the spit. The legend is that buffalo would follow the smoke in the air to find, after a few weeks of walking, fresh green grass where the fire had been.

The moon is red, filtered through the combustibles of a million Douglas fir and lodgepole pine and ponderosa pine. Too quickly they died, if they had only waited a few eons, they might have turned up in a coal mine.

The train sounds a bell as it crosses the highway. The horn fades in the distance, the horn descending in pitch as the sound waves stretch out. Like firewood, coal heats us twice: Once when it is burned for fuel, twice when it burns the planet.

Reach for the Stars

2011-07-09T00:58:00.001-07:00

They say if you were to save a penny the first day and double it every day after that, you would be a millionaire in no time. Flat out millionaire. Like pennies from heaven.

Today, I look up and the heavens are like a rope, clouds braided ahead of a storm, and rain is falling out there 20 miles away, you can see the gust front pushing it like bristles on a blue broom. There is a white streak in the rain; it's hail, penny sized hail rushing down like a mob of shoppers in December, outstretching each other to grab that limited-collector's-edition-styrene-based-children's-entertainment-device, wiping out some man's cornfield, stripping away the cobs, turning it to poor silage. Funny thing, the fellow prayed for rain a few days ago, that day he forgot to renew his crop insurance, and now this. Now he is penniless, scouring the fields for a few edible ears to feed his livestock. He looks at the porch, rustling with his untamed children. They chatter like racoons. He looks at a battered cob in his hand. Hey, what if? The insurance man shakes his head, calls it an Act of God and walks away, dusting off his hands. The children watch him walk until he disappears over a hill. The youngest begins to gnaw on the railing.
The farmer looks up at the sky and closes his eyes for a moment, letting the sun wash it one last time. Clouds quickly intervene and his face darkens.
"Maybe it's time to quit," says his wife. Her yellow hair stands straight on end, like husks from shucked corn.
"I never thought..." He picks up some dirt in his hand and tosses it into the wind. The dirt blows it back in his face.
The insurance man walks along the damaged fields and notices that the division between the damaged crop and the undamaged crop is a clear line, maybe a foot wide. Centuries ago this was grist for rumor mills; the man sold his soul, the wife is a witch, the children are possessed. The insurance man thinks, "I could have made a killing back then." He laughs to himself.
They say that while walking in dangerous neighborhoods you should carry the bulk of your money in your shoes and a few dollars in your pockets, to give to robbers. So, after the fall harvest, the neighbors cut down the shelterbelts and planted larger fields. Hiding corn in their shoes, I guess. Years later, their children crossed numerous strains of corn and fielded larger plants. Then they sought out the robber to get all of this stuff out of their shoes because they couldn't walk. After a while the robbers started to grow too, and in a few decades they had gotten so big that nobody had enough corn to satisfy them. This brings us up to date.
Off in a laboratory the farmer's grandchildren are splicing the genes of corn with crocodiles or coelacanthes or axolotyls or scrappy dockworkers or hamburgers. Fine. There is a pounding on the roof and the technicians look up. Asbestos filters down from the ceiling. They shrug. Looming over the lab is the shadow of a 900-foot tall robber hungry for his next meal. Same one that crushed the church down the road.
So, what lies ahead? It's this: First we planted simple native corn. Then it was hybrids, the Green Revolution. Then it was gene splicing, the Gene Revolution. Exponential growth in yields. Still not enough. Life is not fooled by life; it always recognizes its own kind. Like the grizzly that can smell the chocolate bar inside the wrapper inside the sealed container inside the ice chest locked inside the car with the windows rolled up, we just can't outsmart this biosphere. It knows what we are doing and tells us to reach for the sky and empties our pockets and strips us clean, even taking our shoes.
I mean, are you sure that those are your shoes?
Enough of this. If the biosphere cannot be fooled by its own kind, then the only alternative to introduce a truly alien life form to the human menu. A synthetic crop, inorganically engineered. Hail problems? Engineer a hail-resistant crop, with hardened cellulose and lignin, something developed under controlled laboratory conditions, something with atoms of sulfur or chlorine bound to the native molecules, hardening it like body armor. Field test it in the Midwest. Fire buckshot at it. Run the tractor over it. Thrash it with a bullwhip. Then set it loose. It can rain, it can hail, let it hail, go ahead, come down hard, the Weather Militia, like cluster bombs, cheap nail bombs with gasoline, let nature throw everything in its arsenal and watch as the clouds clear and the rain passes to the east and there, the cornstalks stand tall, glistening and glowing in the sun. A triple rainbow forms a backdrop.
I can see the advertisements now: After supper, a farmer steps outside to admire his fields. The sun has set long ago. The porch lights are off, the house is dark. But the field is lit up - the corn is still glowing. A smile forms on his face, and his skin cracks along his chin; he will be shedding soon. "Yes," he thinks, "Crops. Provide food for my livestock and light for my neighborhood." Then cut away to the Corporate Logo being held in the hand of a furry, three-toed child. Voice over: "A better world. Imagine that."
Sure, double your pennies every day. Exponential growth. Pennies from heaven. Problem is, we would end up eating all the copper for food because we used up everything else making pennies.

You Read It Here

2011-01-11T21:52:00.000-08:00

I watch the setting sun drop into the Pacific ocean and the sky burns red and the ocean begins to boil, sending off plumes of steam that will bring hot rains tomorrow. It is a straight line across the horizon, but I know it's not flat, it is bowed by the moon into tides and it slopes gently toward the edge of the earth where whiskey barrels full of men tumble over the falls and drop into outer space. They say that the space junk is from satellites, but we know better; it is just millions of whiskey barrels accumulating over time. Once in a while they fall out of orbit and burn up as they enter the atmosphere. The Leonid Meteor Shower is just the debris from the Age of Discovery. I am sure, up there somewhere is James Cook, Vasco da Gama, Barentz, Torrez, Elcano, Urdaneta, Balboa, Cabot, Drake, Hudson, Magellan, and even Columbus - plus their ships and briny crews. Swaggering, swashbuckling men swinging swords, strapped into barrels of salt pork, losing altitude, losing confidence. They say you can count hundreds of them in the night sky in mid-November. From here, one can trace a direct line to a very modern idea: Recycling. Somewhere I read that the earth spirals downward and catches the falling waters and it appears in the heavens as a thing we call rain. Sort of like a cistern that catches the rain that runs off of the roof of a house on the Great Plains. This is recycling. But the rains stopped coming, and the cistern never did fill up and the people fled for their lives and I read somewhere else that it was because they were being punished for the intemperance, sloth, and vanity of their ancestors. Now they recycle guilt from one afterlife to another. This is in the same paper that talks about the flat earth.

So, I turn the page and it says that a large raft of aged surfers is swirling in the south Pacific and threatens to alter the delicate ocean chemistry. They float away from shores along the Pacific rim, like coconuts. I quote one researcher from Wayfare University: "The surfers cover an area as large as the state of Kansas." And we all know that Kansas is nowhere near the ocean. Wait a second, I think I see a whiskey barrel falling in the western sky. A streak, copper colored, and it splashes into the sea like an Apollo module. A plume of steam goes up. Then nothing.
Now, persistence is the main concern. The researcher, Lemkus Boulough, stated, "We see that the inorganic and organic solids in the raft are resistant to biodegradation and ultraviolet light, and the corrosive effects of saltwater are rebuffed by the lipid sheen found on the outer laminates of most of the debris." He held up a large block of yellowish wax. "This is what we find forming in the oil sheen around the debris field. We think it has a half life of ten-thousand years." He lit a match under the wax. "But does it burn!" The paper said that the news conference was called off in order to allow firefighters to gain access to the building.
And byproducts are another concern. From his hospital bed, Boulough stated, "Once decomposition occurs, we see that the byproducts are highly toxic. We find bisphenol A, styrenes, and PS oligomer in alarming concentrations. And we are finding that there is secondary kill of scavengers and predators that cruise the deep ocean waters. Poisons are not discriminating."
So the giant raft of surfers slowly spins in the Pacific while pale, white predators and scavengers bob on the surface between bits of polystyrene, polyester, and epoxy surfboards and the expanding oily sheen on the ocean surface. This can be seen from high above, a kaleidoscope of colors, spreading into estuaries, mangrove swamps, tributaries, deltas, and over low lying coral atolls, coating birds and sawgrass and alligators and spawning fish. Everything is flammable now. Recent photos show that the sheen can even be seen from the Barrel-o-sphere some seventeen miles above the earth's surface where men losing altitude and confidence face the grim reality that all of their exploration has rewarded them with one thing: They will descend in a ball of fire.
But the marvels of ecology are at work. We stand in awe of human nature. Errors recycle between generations, are preserved, and are given protective status. No, we won't deplete our supply of barrels any time soon: recycling is at work and the downward spiral of the earth regenerates the atmosphere with barrels each summer, so the earth's expanding rainbow-colored chemical sheen and annual spectacle of failed expeditions can be enjoyed by all for many, many years to come.

Chain Letter Biology

2010-12-19T23:23:00.000-08:00

An old rancher looks at me and asks, "You ever seen a dust storm?" I open my mouth to say yes, but before I can answer, he says, "You've never seen a dust storm."

I look into the distance. Today I can see dust devils on the horizon, three of them, cutting through a bleached cornfield. The cornstalks raise their leaves in panic, but it is too late. The stalks are twisted and torn from the ground and pulled apart, leaf from trembling leaf. Bits of leaves and stalk flutter down from the sky like snow - dry, square flakes of corn snow. I hold a dozen of them in my hand. No two flakes are different from the other. This is the best we can do.
Mars is covered with dust devils. From above, you can see their circular tracks on the iron oxide and basalt, much like those left by tornadoes as they twist across asphalt. But there is no Martian travel guide. So the amateur astronomer peers into his narrow, cloudy lens and jumps! He sees the twisting tracks, scoured into the bare rock. He squints and starts counting the tracks. He spends days counting and cataloging. Then one day he sees something coiling across the rocks. From 100 million miles away, he studies it. From directly overhead. It's an organic, evolving shape, moving, gyrating, growing, cutting a track in the rocks and sand. Tracks like a sidewinder, a kangaroo rat, great blue heron. Therefore it is alive and animal. Is that a tail? A hypothesis is born: Sepia colored, one-eyed, leathery desert giants, with rippled, olive-green arms, twirling across the surface like Triassic Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, swishing their ribbed tails behind them, leaving sparking, spiraling tracks in their wake. Perhaps they make a call like lemurs or dolphins. He rushes out the door. He spreads the word to his friends. His friends spread the word to their friends. Their friends spread the word to their friends. Thus, if each person tells twelve of his friends today, and each of those friends tells twelve of their friends tomorrow, within several days the amateur astronomer with the tiny telescope will himself be contacted by eleven million, seven hundred and thirty-eight thousand, two hundred and two breathless people, gasping to tell him the news that not only are there herds of highly developed, one-eyed aliens on Mars but that they have invaded earth and have taken over the railroads and control the media and are driving that ice-cream truck that is idling in front of his house. Armed with over eleven million independent reports, he is ready to sit down and write his thesis. Now the shadows on the rocks in his telescope look like a top hat and a sparkly sequined gown. He hears them talking to each other.
No, singing. His thesis is published and the audience of millions embraces what they already knew millions knew to be true. Letters pour through the mail slot in his door like coins from a slot machine.
But somewhere out in the wilderness, a village was overlooked and never got the news. Too bad for them. It could be in the desert southwest, somewhere down a slick-rock canyon beneath a sandstone overhang. An Anasazi village. Stone houses tossing empty windows into the dry wash. Scattered amongst shards of clay pots with jittery lines and charcoal cubes are tiny corncobs as big as your thumb, multicolored with stripes and solids, with blue and red and black and purple and orange - like a Scottish scarf, Indian beadwork, an African kanga, a Laotian sihn. Footprints are in the sand from a woman who had just looked at the lines on the corn. Now she draws lines on the wet clay. She is making more pottery. Too bad for her. Drought is sweeping over the stone ridge above her and will suck the creek dry, take the life right out of her. Winds swirl the corn cobs around the dry creek bed leaving circles in the sand. She drops everything and runs, but it is too late.
Today, the winds continue. The fact is, on a barren, stripped landscape, the whirlwinds run amok. The heat is absorbed by the dark basalt and granite and asphalt or depleted inorganic soil, then it rises, fueling a global army of dust devils. They march across the surface exploding and burning everything in their path, exposing more basalt and granite. This does not have to be observed with a telescope. This day, as they pull the plants out by the roots and vaporize the soil, I hear a hissing sound and at several points across the landscape it appears as if the whirlwinds have peeled away the earth's mantle. Air escapes from the earth's core, sucked into the sky along with carpets of spring ephemerals, moss agates, desert varnish, coral reefs, cloud forests, and cobs of corn, no two of them alike. I drop everything and run. I would pass it along, but millions already know that millions know that this is not true. Too bad for all of us.

Failed Vision

2010-12-02T01:20:00.001-08:00

The vision fades with age.

Shielding my eyes from the cloudless skies in the Great Plains in July has not been enough. The ultraviolet rays have slipped around my palm and through my fingers and smeared the lens and numbed the retina. I thought the bones and badlands had bleached over the years, that repeated washings in sunlight took the color away. I thought that the contrails and flue gasses and auto emissions and turpenes were stacking in the dormant air mass. They were mounds of clouds, like bales of cotton. Industrial slaves in the dead of summer, hoisting bales in the open baked land. Not the faintest breeze. I thought I saw a man throw a horse out of his car. Horses were strewn across the landscape, floating in the shimmering heat waves, bobbing like boats. As the years went by, the waves reached my feet and lapped over my shoes. The salt spray left a crust on my clothes. I thought that the heat waves were like tides, advancing toward me as the new moon moved to the zenith, unseen in front of the sun, drawing the oceans upward. Somewhere out there, someone is pointing a finger, as if to say, where were you? If I didn't shield my eyes, I would probably bleach out like those bones that I think that I saw.
I think, this treeless basin is an interrogation room. Just then, I feel someone slam a book on my fingers. My knees shake. I yammer like twelve Olive-throated parrots in a cage. I describe what I saw, but they have me trapped in my words. I stumble from my seat and grope for the doorknob. Do I deny everything? Someone grabs my wrist and I feel a blow to the back of my head. Now everything goes white. Someone is shaking his head. Isn't there an alibi? My recollections are based on observations, careful observations. Through perceptive distortions and cognitive impairments. This is the world that I think that I thought that I knew. I slump back in the chair. I can't recall a thing.

So it is. The ultraviolet radiation pours down like rain, through a porous sky, poked full of holes by industrial stacks and aviation and overinflated ideas and a thousand hands reaching for the stars. There's gold in them thar stars. If I was a welder, I would wear a mask to protect my sight. But a million welders wearing a million masks marching across the landscape yammering like twelve million parrots is terrifying. What can I see that nobody else can't?

This is what they say, the idea: They say that this is the ascent, the condition under which life will accelerate. Advanced habitat and response. Already, the wisdom teeth fail to form, the vestigial tail is absorbed, the third eyelid recedes, the appendix shrinks, and the pinky toe shrivels away. Our fear of height and water has driven us from treetops and underwater life. We have migrated toward an engineered diet of spongiform petroleum products. Advances in food and water delivery systems has enabled us to abandon bipedalism in favor of a sitting position. Air is filtered, light is designed, sound is composed. Pseudogenes multiply, and we cast off our appendages, free at last, free at last.
Then comes the ultraviolet light, pouring down. Go ahead, punch another hole in the sky. And I think, this treeless basin has become a genetics laboratory, a mutation breeder reactor. Just then, my hands begin to swell, then my knees. I start stammering. I can't formulate any words, I can't describe what I am seeing, my thoughts are trapped in my head and I can't get out of my chair. Words and ideas are deleted, duplicated, inverted, inserted and translocated. And then, there is a sharp pain in my head and all I see is white. I can't remember a thing.
This is enlightenment? The body has a fifty-year warranty; there are gene regulators, DNA repair mechanisms, but what about our ideas? Uninsulated and prone, they mutate. They spill out, stillborn, damaged, enraged, deranged, flailing, with six arms, reptilian, with vestigial tails nine feet long - with spikes - and scaly skin, third eyes, bony plates, and breathing fire and growing at a rate that, given enough time, will require four earths to feed.
Up to this point, the saving grace has been their failure to thrive.
Looking out across the expanding urban necropolis, the the hellscape swelling like an aneurysm, sores weeping toxic oils, molten lead raining from the sky, with packs of rock-throwing men hunting down the sick and elderly, spasmodic eruptions of shoppers, the money fires illuminating the night, I realize that there is a day that I may deny ever having been here.

Assumption of Independence

2010-10-25T22:25:00.000-07:00

As I watched the heads of industrialized nations gather on the steps of the Bourse de Bruxelles last Friday, posing for photographs, a man behind me shouted, "Follow your dreams!"

I wondered, Day or night?
Spokesman Saul Changoranatan, CEO of of Blodder, Marthian, and Bewomb, a venture capital firm that targets emerging geoengineering technologies, moved toward the microphone and declared, "Our shared dreams are soon to be a shared reality." Reading from prepared notes, he asserted that "the current crisis is an advantage. Current conditions present the human race with a once-in-an-epoch opportunity for renewal, positive change, adaptation, and growth."
I looked at the clock above the entryway. It was 10:14.
Few recognized that those words were the same ones uttered two weeks earlier by an obscure mechanical engineer in a speech he gave at a high school graduation ceremony in Cantansezia, Kansas.
It was Mel Thrattlingshire, an NIT graduate. I tracked Mel down at a cafe in Kansas City a few days later. "It was my daughter's graduation," he explained. "She was valedictorian, of course." He leaned back in his chair and smiled. "They actually read directly from my handwritten notes." He looked at the tablecloth, vinyl, with red and white checkers. "I was stunned. How did they get them?" He pulled a mechanical pencil from his pocket protector, grabbed a napkin from the dispenser and started to scribble. "Aha. See?" He held up the napkin. He had calculated that the dissemination of his ideas at the Bourse was equivalent to publishing four peer-reviewed articles. "It is working out well: I saved four years of research and writing and groveling before two rich benefactors." He tipped his head back and laughed. "I have the data right here in my wallet."
I leaned over to look. "It's empty."
The smile dropped and he leaned across the table and whispered, "It's a metaphor."
"And the metaphor?"
His eyebrows crossed. "Look, bud, we are at the threshold. We face a world with exponential growth in change, an explosion of possibilities. Anything can happen. And what is possible, if we persist, will be probable, and what is probable, given enough opportunity, becomes certainty." He scratched a large black mole on his arm. I thought that the mole appeared to move but he rolled down his sleeve. "Our dreams will come true; we will ascend."
I rubbed my eyes. To where? I noticed that the second hand on the clock on the wall was moving but the minute hand was stuck on 14 and the hour hand on 10. Forever was now and it wasn't going away soon.
He said that it was a daydream that started it all. "It was during a moment of silence at my daughter's graduation ceremony." Mel raised his arm and pointed at the wall. "I looked around at the auditorium in front of me, filled with thousands of teenagers dressed in the school colors. Everyone had their eyes closed and heads bowed. Nobody said a word. It was beautiful. And then all at once, they started to sing the school song." He cleared his throat.

Warriors brave and bold,
Fists raised at the sky,
Victory is ours, Yes,
Victory or die!

He smiled broadly, looking at the sky out the window. He pumped his fist. "It was inspiring. That's where I got this idea." He paused and watched two men arguing over a parking space.
"What idea?"
"It's from this information age; it bombards us with statements, with ideas. Words everywhere, like gamma rays. The information increase is breathtaking. Did you know that an average man today hears more information in a day than an average man in the 1800's heard in his lifetime? You need to cut through it with a machete, it grows so fast." A buzzing noise came from the kitchen and he turned his head and cocked his ear. It was a radio announcing a severe thunderstorm warning.
He turned back. His glasses reflected the dark, cloudy sky and his eyes disappeared. "And it's diverging into two opposing universes of thought, like thought and anti-thought." He paused. "Sometimes..." His voice trailed away.
"Sometimes?"
"Sometimes the spheres of thought balance out so perfectly that they cancel each other out and all you can hear is white noise - the background radiation." He looked up at the sky. "Like the pinging of Sputnik in your earphones as it sailed across the blackened heavens." He squinted. "A thousand miles overhead, so far out of reach." He looked at the kitchen. "So far..."
I watched as the two men continued to argue, shouting above one another. "Too far."
"So far away - that - that's when you begin to hear things." Now Mel, seeing my eyes switch between him and the two men arguing, looked at the clock on the wall. His eyes brightened. "We just need one more moment of chance, that's all. That will be our breakthrough."
He looked at his hands, folding the napkins on the table in front of him into ever tightening squares. "When two ideas collide, you get one stronger idea. When four ideas collide, you get two stronger ideas. So, imagine the strength of doctrine, the dominion of thought we have under these conditions."
"Strength - or haze?" I noticed one of the men shove the other.
"Strength. The bombardment of ideas, the mutagenesis of thought. Dialectic Steel. We are on an upward spiral." He sat up and swirled his finger in the air.
My eyes followed his hand but I felt myself getting dizzy. "You mean heaven?"
A waitress appeared at his side. "This isn't theology, this is empirical. It's the material equivalent, if you will." She asked for his order. Scrambled eggs and toast. Just water for me.
I put my face in my hands. "This sounds like an invitation to the Roman Games."
"Rome gave us a Republic."
"And Pompeii."
"Look, the winners got a crown and glory and a seat by Jupiter." He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. The two men were nose to nose. He sighed. "We get the equivalent."
I stared at his face. Now, nothing moved except a small blood vessel on his left temple.
He gave a slight nod, then continued. "Lincoln said that government accomplishes collectively what people cannot do individually." He pushed the salt shaker toward me. "So, collectively, we can accomplish anything." He pushed the tightly folded napkins toward me. "You see?"
I closed my eyes. "No."
"What we have in front of us, is a quantum leap forward, the cladogenesis of our species. It is our moment in time. We are at the threshold of reaching unity, of becoming one, a global organism, a pan-species."
"From static?"
"No, no - " he slipped forward in his chair. "It's music, really. It's collective consciousness and shared memory and common dreams and mass movement." The two men were now wrestling. A small crowd gathered and watched. A tow truck was pulling up alongside the cars.
Then one man threw a punch. Then the other. I turned my head. "What movement? You mean revolution?"
He laughed. "Speciation is not revolution. It's ascent. This is not a political act that saves us, it is a biological act." He sat up straight again and looked me in the eye. His glasses reflected the two men fighting, like a stereopticon. They both were defeating each other twice. His face began to swell. "Imagine the world of mankind sending sulfur dioxide balloons up into the upper atmosphere and releasing their gasses to dim the sun and cool the earth -"
"I -"
"Call it our Million Man Volcano." His face was red.
"But -"
"Or millions of windbreaks in the Gulf of Mexico to break up hurricanes - a public works project. Full employment. The Hurricane Nation."
"No -"
"Or millions of people cutting millions of acres of trees across fire-dependent ecosystems. Indefinitely! Save houses and everyone has a job. Call it The Human Firestorm. "
"You are -"
"We are - We, The Ecosystem. It's time. We have spent too many years wringing our hands, passively accepting whatever this planet throws at us. We have the can-do spirit. We cannot take this lying down. This is a call to action. We, an environmental re-evolution. It is certain to happen."
I had to look away. The two men were lying unconscious on the sidewalk. Hailstones, the size of baseballs, began to fall. "Yep."

"You see, when we work together, as a species, there is nothing that we cannot achieve. Collectively, this earth is just no match for us."

Killing Fields

2010-02-08T20:30:00.000-08:00

A yellow-throated vireo falls to the ground without our knowledge.

Each year, on a Saturday morning in early October, an airplane would fly over our town and drop pastel-colored leaflets - pink, yellow, pale blue, pale green. This was part of the "Fire Prevention Week" festivities, held on the anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire of 1871. The leaflets had a drawing of a fireman looking at a sheet of paper he held in his hand. He had this expression of shock and determination. Something on the front of the paper disturbed him, but it was out of view. I always wondered what the fireman saw on the front; I imagined it was some fire-crime in progress, maybe a picture of a child playing with matches. The backside of the paper was usually blank but a few of the leaflets had the word "Candy" stamped on it. If you found one of these, you could turn it in for free candy at the fire station. So, on this morning, hundreds of schoolchildren would fan out in the neighborhood, rummaging through hedges, fields, backyards, treetops, looking for a winning leaflet. I found thousands of leaflets, but I never found one with the word "Candy". Nor can I find one today.
One hundred years earlier, two men had played with matches in a barn near the alley behind 137 DeKoven Street. In the aftermath, people wandered about, stumbling through the ruins of their homes, stunned, despairing, helpless, picking through the bricks and mounds of blackened studs and plaster and paneling in search of something valuable - a child's toy, a kettle, a pocket watch. I do not know if they ever found anything either.
So, six weeks ago I stood in a market in southern Africa, looking at animal hides and carved soapstone and ebony elephants and wooden masks and East Indian spices and bone necklaces and something to shade my iridescent head. As I paid for my items, the shopkeeper, in gratitude for my patronage, gave me a gift. It was a bank note from the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe. I have it here in front of me right now. The note says "Special Agro-Cheque" on both sides. It is signed by a Dr. G. Gono, Governor. Dr. Gono is the head of the Reserve Bank. The note is valued at 100 billion dollars. Or so it says. The result is this: a box of tissue paper is smaller than the stack of paper money required to buy it. The note actually has an expiration date on it, "Pay to the bearer on demand...on or before 31st December 2008." It occurred to me that if I looked, I might find them scattered across the veld, caught in acacia trees, floating in rivers, drifts of them behind granaries.
This is what is called hyperinflation, when the winds of the economy become hurricane force. There are those that say that this hyperinflation was the result of a rapid expansion of the money supply in Zimbabwe. Some say that there is a direct connection between prices and money supply; others contend that there is no direct connection. Others take a middle ground. Others say it depends. Theories abound - Quantity Theory, Fiscal Theory, Real Bills Doctrine. These go back hundreds of years. Self liquidating paper with forthcoming productions on monetary aggregate real values and net national product or structural deficit on the equilibrium price level. Sixteen men playing with matches. Meanwhile, Zimbabweans rummage through the ruins of their lives searching for bits of aluminum to sell for scrap. Eventually, they will start using bits of aluminum as currency - and eureka! somewhere, in some laboratory, an economic theory is born. Make that seventeen men. Another idea blows around in the wind.
And another vireo falls. There could be millions of them falling for all we know. Vireos and northern parulas and Acadian flycatchers and hooded warblers and wood thrushes and scarlet tanagers. Now let me postulate: I suppose that this could be a function of the total supply of birds multiplied by their velocity or a function of the demand for birds, a constant aggregate supply, or projected reproduction, while some always remain in reserves, and besides, if we are wealthy, the birds can be traded for bird credits and divided by their demand on the exotic pet market. It might be the function of seventeen men talking.
I have spent years chasing down valuables in hedges, fields, backyards, treetops, looking for something, anything - and what do I find - another man with a shocked expression holding a blank piece of paper. Tonight I hear thumping on the roof of my house. What is it? Is that the sound of embers or is it birds?

Shosholoza

2010-02-03T22:49:00.000-08:00

Folded up like origami, strapped into position like a man in an electric chair, fed 5/8-scale replicas of food, and forced to stare at an unblinking screen showing an endless loop of a man struggling to break free from his seat might seem to be an attempt by security apparatchik to extract some vital information about an impending act of faith-based schizophrenia or how one in custody might break free from legirons or my maiden's last four digits or the name of my favorite social security card, but the comparisons to prison life find more parallels in prison life than those actually found in prison life. I asked the man across the aisle if he would trade a package of filter-less crackers for a place in the line leading to the lavatory. Or maybe a seat by the emergency exit. He looked at my face and said the price just went up three hundred percent. I recalled statesmen before me and their phlebitic struggles in air flight and I wondered if I had been elected in absentia. "Oh boy!," I thought, "I'm going to Absentia."
I always wanted to go there. Why, I spent most of my childhood daydreaming about the place. And now, the day had arrived. I thought about my family back home. I grew misty. They always said I would end up there. How did they know?
I leaned back in my seat, closed my eyes, and smiled. This was no tiny, airless cell, it was a universe of possibilities. A new world. That baby in row 29, why, he howled like a hyena. The coughing man was calling wild game. A woman walked by balancing her luggage on her head. The man with the hairy neck in 34A bounded from his seat and swung from aisle to aisle. The engines roared like lions. Women gathered in the galley to collect the day's water and scrub their laundry. Newspapers rustled like palmettos. Nobody spoke my language. There was laughing in the back, where men were carving wooden bowls. Somebody hung a woven mat from a tree. A woman walked down the aisle, sweeping it with a straw broom, followed by a line of stewardesses singing in four part harmony.

Move fast
On those mountains
You are running away
On those mountains

Just then, somebody must have chopped open a pineapple; I smelled pineapple, I know it. Where was it? Then a woman appeared at my side and put a plate of antelope stew before me and I scooped it out of the bowl with my left hand. It was delicious. Someone grabbed my arm and I opened my eyes.
It was still dark.
Stars faltered in the moonless sky. I stretched out in my chair. Somewhere out there in the darkness I had seen a herd of hills that followed a dry valley lined with fever trees. The hills were like the backs of cape buffalo, migrating to the western horizon. Now, I could hear the hills moving quickly. Everything moved quickly. This night, the wind charged out of the west, fierce, snorting, stampeding up the valley and the slope in front of me, scattering everything in its path, swinging everything around like a weather vane - even the sky had turned. I tilted my head to see. Orion was now standing upright, directly overhead. Dim and scintillating, he trembled like an aging warrior, red and shrunken, a wrinkled, dying man. I tilted my head again and he was now the reflection of the faint civilization below, where idle men sat in the dirt beneath umbrella trees poking sticks into campfires that sent a plume of orange stars to replenish the night sky while old women folded their hands eleven different ways. An old man nodded. The acacia were swept up by the wind and their thorns fell into an argument, chattering across the valley. The wind burst over the hilltop, full of urgency. My hat blew away. The thatched roof rattled like bones. Wooden masks shuddered against the walls. Chairs walked across the grass. Termites fell from the sky. Predators, gloved and silent, stalked the bush. There was a muffled cry beneath the roar of the wind. I thought I heard a body fall to the ground.

I jumped from my chair.

The wind carried the blackness above like an animal skin, rippling, with swirls of smoke from distant cook fires and the scent of acacia blossoms and wild lemon. That smell, something like pine and peppermint and vinegar and whiskey and creosote. I wanted that wind. I reached out my hand. The savanna arched and hissed, waterless, thirsting. It was said that in the bush, lions patrol the boundaries, swinging paws like scythes, sweeping the edge for men who stray too far from the village.
This was not home, but in the darkness, it looked the same. I stepped closer to the edge. I couldn't see anything, but I heard women singing. Something grabbed my arm and I was gone.

The Margin of Error

2009-06-20T00:04:00.001-07:00

In the quest for scientific truth, there is little mention of the fact that during the course of controlled experiment or the gathering of data that the failure of the soda pop machine to dispense the right change to the research scientists altered the outcome of the research to a statistically significant degree. That explains why the space capsule landed in another hemisphere, upside down. Not only did the soda pop machine have such an effect, but so did the bacterially-active bologna and mayonnaise sandwich prepared by the kitchen staff. And the brittle cataracts in the researcher's eyes. And the phone call in the afternoon from the cousin in jail asking for bail money. This is the Wonderful World of Science. Ignore the convict behind the curtain, you are looking at Great Truths.

I think a lot about that phone call from the incarcerated relative, begging for lunch money and a pie with metal-file filling, as I walk about the boreal forest in northern Minnesota in search of things that in all probability do not exist but cannot be excluded without an all-knowing frame of reference, which frame of reference can be approximated through statistically significant sample sizes, generally numbering well less than infinity, which, doggonnit, invariably fail to consider that one sample that contains that which you, in the end, had assumed not to exist. Maybe if we maintain the sample size but enlarge the number of identical studies we can exclude the possibility. Or maybe if we have a massive amount of people say the same thing we can make it come true. Why, the sheer force of my personality might do it. But I am on a tangent and I am struggling to stay on point, as are the rest of my colleagues.
It was a lazy day about the woods and I thought it fine to engage in some informal postulations, perhaps stumbling upon some Higher Truth along the way. Make haste, I said, for a moment you can imagine that the cause of humanity rests on your shoulders. I observed: 1) I am a carbohydrate burning vessel. 2) I exude carbon dioxide 3) I attract carbon dioxide seeking organisms. Perhaps, I surmised, I can determine my "Carbon Footprint" by measuring exactly how many of such organisms were attracted to my person. Determining the total surface area I occupied at that moment, I arrived at 1.94 square meters, a figure, I discovered, that was identical to the amount of surface area occupied by the eleven heavily carbonated feral cats that lived behind our house in South Dakota in 1991 or the eight bottles of Fonseca Vintage Port 1970 in the wine rack. The wine caught the attention of a group of my colleagues, and all at once they set upon a rigorous regression analysis. For two hours, they carried out 16 repeated measurements involving eight independent variables. They found that after each measurement, the dependent variable approached zero. They were on to something. The unknown parameter appeared to be within grasp. They thought it might have something to do with the pizza delivery boy appearing seven times, clearly a random variable, but the exact function wasn't known. But they abandoned the study at the last measure; for all the while they had been carrying on they had found that their own surface area had expanded to a shocking degree, well beyond what anyone would have predicted. The phone rang and it was my cousin again.
Anyhow, a census of the black fly population that taxied about my surface area revealed 6,432 flies. This is some 3000 flies per square meter. Now to be useful, one might say that I need to measure my carbon output and I need to compare this to other carbon producers. But I have already determined that these are 6,432 random variables at any given moment in an environment where I, of 2 square meters, am in search of a species which depends upon my observation for its survival. This search is through third-growth recovering forest, stripped of old growth characteristics, choked with aspen clones and hazelnut thickets and mountain maple and balsam fir deadfall, all observed through the matrix of mosquito netting and the haze of fogged prescription glasses, beaded with rain and perspiration, while an electrolyte-depleted circulatory system produces leg cramps and heat exhaustion and iron streaked rocks send the compass spinning like a roulette wheel and the black flies sound like rain as they bombard my clothing and this is supposed to determine the nonexistence of an object in a 50-acre patch of forest.
The formula should read something like:

Where Y is the rare plant frequency and X represents independent variables including survey intensity, stand potential, phenological stage, light intensity, deadfall proliferation, drought index, spruce budworm kill factor, seral stage, deer density, slope, soil moisture, wind speed, surveyor education, surveyor experience, surveyor organizational skill, surveyor lactate levels, electrolyte imbalance, neurotransmittor depletion, excess body temperature, eyeglass opacity, cornea deterioration, cognitive disassembly, caffeine-induced confidence, memory loss, methamphetamine lab density, mosquito netting shear strength, boot porosity, pencil loss, blister quotient, degree of disorientation, fungal growth rate, bone fracture, anxiety level, battery failure, life insurance dollar amount, declining profit margins, and bitter regret. Each E represents one of 6,432 black flies.
I think I am on to something. Here we begin to figure out the value of B. The dependent variable Y is inversely proportional to the value of the independent variable X and the error factor E. As X and E increase, Y decreases. So let me get this straight: This is to say, as the probability of the existence of a rare species approaches zero, so do I.

From northern Minnesota:
Dryopteris fragrans, or Fragrant fern. Rare in WI, but common in MN. Very pleasant smell when crushed. Found on sheltered, vertical cliff face, typical habitat.

Anytown, ND

2009-05-14T22:09:00.000-07:00

As I walk, I feel the need to run.
Children used to skip along on the sidewalks in this town. There were twelve blocks here, each ringed by sidewalks that passed tall homes with porches, whitewashed churches, a high school, a courthouse, and a business district with the glass storefronts and two story facades and stamped metal siding and bald men in aprons standing behind counters. People watched parades from these sidewalks, and weddings and funerals and political speeches and auctions. They waved to neighbors here. They raised families.
The children would race along these sidewalks, breathless, until they came upon crude squares drawn on the sidewalk with stolen chalk. They would skid to a stop, piling up behind the leader like cattle loading into stock cars. These were the hopscotch squares. They would appear each afternoon at a different location along the sidewalk corridor. Nobody seemed to know who drew them. The children would fall into line, silently arranging their clothes. Then, one by one, each would balance himself, measure his step and hop along in sequences of one or two feet, counting aloud to the last square. Then they would run along. Think of it. A few minutes balancing over distorted geometric figures etched by unseen hands accomplished more than nine months staring at a shock-haired teacher scribbling circular madness on slate.
Seventy years later, the sidewalks are overgrown with caragana and lilac bushes. The town has been stripped of population by war, drought, dust, accident, debt, boredom, and disillusionment. The chalk is gone. The school was struck by lightning and burned down. The last mayor died decades ago. The church buried its last parishioner. The children stopped counting.
Now it is night. It is winter, January, deep in January, when the sun cannot bear to watch. When winter charges out of the boreal forests of Saskatchewan, raging and slicing, and slays everything in its path. When clouds race in front of the moon as fast as movie frames, piling up on the southeastern horizon. The alcohol in the thermometer freezes. Windmills shatter and send wooden slats into the air. Cattle stagger blindly into ravines and are buried by drifting snow. My eyelids stick together, tears freeze on my face, frost forms on my hood. I cannot feel my feet. The drifts harden like concrete. I grope along one flat snowdune like an old man on the way to the saloon. I lose track. I feel the stinging insult, I hear the barking order to leave right now.
There is a grain elevator towering above me. Augers dangle from the walls probing for spilled grain. Broken windows sound a toothless whistle. A mercury vapor light washes away color. The wind runs across the corrugated steel like a child with a stick running along a picket fence. The panels rattle and shudder and peel away. The entire elevator sways. Snow drifts accumulate on the south side of the elevator, forming a dune across the railroad tracks, tracks abandoned thirty years ago.
I can see in the moonlight the steeple of the old church, two blocks to the south, standing above the 100 year old elms. It is no longer white. Decades of wind, hail, rain, snow, dust and neglect have stripped it, revealing the raw ashen wood returning to the dust from which it came. The church bell rings in the wind, steadily, unwaveringly, like a ship's bell sounding distress. And it rings in time with the swaying of the grain elevator. I look up and now the power lines and phone lines have the same rhythm. And the road signs. And the courthouse flagpole. It's harmony. The entire town sways.
I hear it, I get the message. I run.

Market Day

2009-01-19T22:40:00.000-08:00

The grass chattered as we passed, carried against our will by some 40 mile an hour, subzero wind that charged from the Alberta prairie, broke through a border crossing, and kidnapped us on the open range. We raised our guns but we were subdued. Eyes filled with tears, faces turned down, we surrendered. Grain silos shuddered. Power lines wailed. They say the customs agent turned his head.
It's Shopping for Organically Fed Venison with your host, James Nauertz.
Every year, there is a price: It could be a long, cold, gray arm that reaches out of the slurried, bottomless creek and pulls one of us under, a muffled shout, then silence. Did you say something? Or maybe you are on your knees, in penitent mood, exposed to the world beneath a full moon, winds blowing the snow like desert sand, while you pound on the side of the locked camper like Fred Flintstone. Or you are creeping along unnamed roads, shadowed by an angry rancher or two, activist frontier justices, single-handedly redefining the limits of the first and fourth amendments, anti-federalists, a domestic faction searching of a large, captive audience. Usually there is an evening at Edith Dysentary's cafe, with the badly charred chef, and bowls of fluffy Cryptosporidium Soup, self-replicating dinnerware, four-dimensional jello, a scenic tour of the petroglyphs mounting at the salad bar, and diversion provided by the seven-armed waitress and her daughter, Methyl. Just can't take your eyes off it.

Not a very fair trade, I figure, as we drag a mule deer across the prairie against its will. I will never get used to this.

James Nauertz, Neighborhood Food Pantry, exploring the niche.

This End Up

2008-12-31T21:28:00.001-08:00

So this is what it has come to.
Nineteen reports written this season, mostly about rare plants.
It's a formidable task, toiling beneath a relentless and deafening barrage of deadlines. Sitting on an orange crate in this unheated office, typing on some antique Royal beneath a flickering light bulb, brushing away the flakes of lead paint that fall from the ceiling, gnawing on my leather belt to stave off the pangs of hunger. My shoes disappeared long ago. I think that each report was due at an earlier date than the previous report. There, another one hits the door. I dive beneath the desk. I jump at the sound of the water pipes rattling, my nerves are so shot.
I had an idea. To solve the problem, I started writing the bibliography first, then worked backward. That way, I could say that I was finishing up when I started and say so with the utmost confidence. I figured, the longer I wrote, the earlier it would get. Everybody comes out a winner and I am free. But as the report progressed, the less I knew and, when I had reached the end, it got real vague - the professionals call it abstract - and then I didn't know anything at all, as if nothing ever happened. This is what I know now and sadly, I am still confident. And then these people claiming to be my clients whom I do not recognize pummel me with questions I cannot answer and threaten me with things I cannot comprehend. I am sure of that. This is not working out as I had hoped.

I am way too tired to make any sense at this moment and it is entirely possible that this condition predates the report, in which case it can be expected that some agency out there will be announcing some revolutionary findings in the ecological fields, sending the demagogues scurrying for another bandwagon. I can hear them now: We must act! We must be bold!
Man, I often wonder if anyone actually reviews the data in my spreadsheets.
So, before anyone storms the Bastille, maybe they should look at the numbers. I mean, I have no idea what I mean.

Have a look:
Eriogonum visheri survey 2006 - Grand River National Grassland
Chenopodium subglabrum survey 2007 - Grand River National Grassland
Talinum parviflorum survey 2008 - Cedar River National Grassland

No Sign of Life

2008-12-08T19:26:00.000-08:00

I hear whispers but they might be leaves rustling.

This blog itself threatens all claims I may make to a presence in the blog-o-sphere. It is unnerving to see that nothing out there is responding to what I am not saying, raising questions about us all. That is, Am I not OK, are you not OK. Like a faulty probe lowered down into a mineshaft, one side wonders if all were overtaken by carbon monoxide, the other wonders if all were vaporized in some atomic blast. Could we all be right?
As it is, we spent a summer slogging about the northern tier of states in search of vanishing and nonviable species and then a fall thrashing about the keyboard, trying to remember it all. On the other end of that thought string there is an idea and it might be recalled, but the string has come undone, the images spin off in all directions, and all I see is a flurry of species, like a deck of cards tossed in the air. Is there anything in there? Deep down, I wonder if I am really asking this.
This will be all over with soon enough, much like the vanishing species, and nobody will know what it is that they have lost. Silence, memory, I have to believe that I am well.

Motion Sickness

2008-05-07T21:17:00.000-07:00

Where am I.

We headed to North Dakota to look for eagles. This was an aerial survey, in the western badlands. While I am not terrified by flight or by eagles, I am easily disoriented, befuddled, vertiginous, and ultimately degastricized when placed in spinning rooms, so I opted to stay on the ground. Amy took to the skies. The pilot was a Boyd Trester, of Sentinel Butte, ND, at the controls of a Piper Super Cub, an inveterate pilot of advanced flight and remote sensing skills. At 67 years old, 80 miles an hour, and 100 feet above the ground, he reads the ground like newsprint.

No eagles were found, but they saw plenty of nests, prairie dogs, porcupine, magpies, coyotes, elk, mule deer, antelope, and one crazed biologist wandering in circles on the prairie below, wondering why he agreed to stay on the ground. This was followed by doubt if he were actually on the ground, then compass readings, then conviction he was on the ground, then he took to wondering why he was on the ground again and the cycle began anew.
Break time, and they slipped out of the sky and skipped along a gravel road for 100 feet before coming to a stop. They laughed and marveled. I drove up to meet them, they offered their sympathy, described the earth in great detail, then traveled another 100 feet and they were airborne again. I resumed circling.
Here is the problem. I am attempting to follow a blurry map coiled in my trembling hand while the earth rotates at a thousand miles an hour from west to east while it revolves some sixty thousand miles an hour around the sun while the solar system revolves at some unfathomable speed around some central point in the galaxy while the galaxy moves with explosive force away from a central point in the universe while, it is proposed, the universe moves away from a central point amidst other universes while, it may be postulated, still other universe clusters emerge from some theoretical haze as covens of babbling astronomers prepare to describe even more clusters of universe clusters within universe clusters moving about some point somewhere, which point, for all we know, exists at this precise moment only in some astronomer's mind. It is enough to make your head spin.
While in Belize I spun around on my feet for three weeks searching for my shadow, but found none, and then I gave up. This was alarming. This occupied my mind for much too long, and I began to char and desquamate beneath the torrid tropical sun. All along, it was directly overhead, out of view, beyond reach, the fabled ascian madness. How can it be light when there is no light? I swatted at it, expecting to bat it to the ground where I could steady it with my glare. But it evaded me, like deerflies buzzing about my head. It was for this, among other things, that I returned to the Northwoods, and now, deerflies again, but the sun is visible in the southern sky. At high noon. Out of habit now, I swat at them and suddenly it gets very dark. A dog barks. A whippoorwill sings. Men fire arrows into the blackness.
At night the frogs sound like science fiction. A large silver ship lands on the shores of a bog, chirping, and dozens of platy warriors angulate out the trap door, swell their throats, and melt my mind with high frequency waves. I open my mouth and confess everything: the grade school pranks, the dinner cancellations, the size of the fish, my mother's maiden name. The frogs fall silent. I am ashamed. What will they do now? To the west, a fog rolls in from the surrounding hills. Ten minutes later it envelops the bog and swallows the ship. Eventually, everything slips into the haze and soon, for all I know, nothing was ever there. It could have been a passing thought. I am relieved.
The next morning, I find that my bank account has been drained dry. That night, the frogs were louder than ever. My night is tortured, I cannot sleep; my mind is spinning.

Running on Fumes

2008-04-10T22:50:00.001-07:00

I see smoke.

A woman down the road tells me that her husband was bitten by a Fer-de-lance and died quickly. She said this as she stood by an empty washing machine washing clothes by hand in a galvanized tub. The locals say that 'you die right on the spot.' They saw one crossing the road the other night and the next day the neighbors set the woods on fire. Fires burn all over the landscape here, on the same scale that they burn in Florida in late spring, but with much less hysteria. In fact, not much more than a passing glance. What gets attention are busses, and the eyes are almost always fixed on the horizon, scanning it for a bus that never comes. An abandoned car sits in the field that burns.
This is savanna down here, pine, palmetto, and oak, designed to burn in the dry season. But fire here barely leaves a mark. It seems the grass is greening up right behind the flames. Within a few weeks, there is no trace. This is not like the Rocky Mountains, where the Lodgepole pines will memorialize some conflagration for 20 years before they tire of it and lay down. There are innumerable burned tree stumps in the Great Lakes forests, the ink stained fingerprint of a murderous fire, some maybe a hundred years old. It is more like the fires in the Great Plains, where some lightning shocks the prairie and the wind whips up and the grass sheds flames thirty feet high running fifty miles an hour, outracing cattle and horses and rabbits and firefighters, but behind the flames, about two weeks away, is green grass. And, centuries ago, three weeks behind the grass were the herds of bison.

So the machinery is still here - the components and the processes; the Fer-de-lance, the Jaguar, the Harpie eagle, the fires - sort of like that abandoned car that now burns with the grass and palmetto and oak and occasional plastic bottle. A few hours ago, portions of it could have been salvaged, why, it might have even started up with a few adjustments. It was all there. But the fire takes out the brake lines, vacuum lines, spark plug wires, gasoline lines, and in a whumph! there goes the gas tank too.

I look out across the savanna and I see the machinery is still here, why, I can see smoke. Wait a second... Ah, my mistake, it's a smokestack. Enterprise, not fire, consumes the tropics. How far back does one have to go to a time when there wasn't mention of coral bleaching, slash and burn agriculture, caliche, alien species, cattle ranches, gemstone mines, oil wells, paper mills, access roads, poaching, drug plantations, fish farms, and species extinction on the hour, every hour? It seems like yesterday. Salvage? No, run for your life. We have stripped the machinery, stripped it of fire, flood, pollinators, carnivores, watersheds, wetlands, and corridors, and any minute now we'll hit the keystone species and whompfh! there goes the ecosystem.

The Dream Job

2008-02-17T21:27:00.001-08:00

My impression is that the impression many readers have is that all I do is sit around in the rocking chair in front of the fireplace, knitting puffy sweaters for poodles, dreaming of the life of a field biologist, delighting in fanciful tales of nail-biting adventure, all-night revelry, and crushing academic victory. I picture myself looking out the window for hours on end, wishing. Hey, I am not the one with the imagination. This could not be further from what is not untrue. Imagine the people reading this blog! We cannot afford to be confused any more than we are.

Look. Here is Ranunculus lappoinicus, or Lapland buttercup, from the Superior National Forest near Grand Marais, Minnesota. I found it in June. It is rare in Wisconsin, Maine, Minnesota, Michigan.

Not much room for argument here. Then there was Geocaulon lividum, or northern comandra. From the same general location as the one above, near Grand Marais, Minnesota. Rare in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Maine, New Hampshire, New York.

The smoking gun. And then Chenopodium subglabrum, or smooth goosefoot, from the Grand River National Grassland in South Dakota. Rare in North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota. I found this in August.

So there. The peer reviewers lay strewn about the fields. The editorial board prints a retraction. The newspaperman weeps. I am not sure if this is making sense; I am getting real stiff from sitting.

Might Makes Truth

2008-01-23T22:18:00.000-08:00

I take several multi-layered hats off my pleated brow in respect to the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature. Back in 1994 they codified the byzantine business of naming plants.
Now this is a monumental task. As you may know, living things are represented in the scientific literature and texts in a hierarchical arrangement. This means that they are grouped in descending layers according to increasingly detailed criteria. The theory is that the arrangement reflects the evolutionary descent of the species. The arrangement, from general to specific, is as follows:

Kingdom, Division, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species, Subspecies, Variety, Cultivated Variety, Form.

The codification looks to reduce or eliminate confusion and reckless habits in the taxonomic culture. As an example, take the orb-weaving spider. Its genus name is Pachygnatha and its species name is zappa. Zappa? Indeed, it is a tribute to the late Frank Zappa, the prolific electric guitarist of the Psychedelic Age of the mid-20th century. Evidently, a black mark on the spider was inspired by Frank's late mustache. The turmoil that results from such a designation can only be imagined. After all, the science behind the hierarchy is staid, peer reviewed, unyielding, unassailable, and dependable, and the scientific communities that surround it are stabilized by its influence. Open the nomenclature to guitarists, and who knows what vermin, vagrants, villians, and vagabonds will infiltrate the hierarchy. Imagine the pressure on simple postulates and theorems! Instability would result and cascade throughout the web of scientific disciplines. Who would want his name connected with collapse of ideas?

The scientific rationale of hierarchy, at a glance:
Species: One text defines it this way: "Ideally and theoretically is a set of individuals closely related by descent from a common ancestor. Members of a species can interbreed with each other successfully but cannot interbreed with individuals of any other species." Yes, there it is. Of course, the text continues, "Most species are not so predictable."
Subspecies: Here it states, "They may not interbreed well with closely related species but an occasional cross pollination results in a viable seed that grows into a fertile adult. If this occurs frequently, the two plant groups may best be considered subspecies of a single species." So there.
Genus: It continues, "Closely related species are grouped into genera. Deciding whether several species are closely related enough to be placed together in the same genus is difficult." Indeed. We have mathematical models that correct human error.
"No objective criteria exist; the decision is entirely subjective and often the cause of great dispute." Not to be alarmed: Scientific progress has come at great human cost. The human toll must be absorbed.
"Both groups of taxonomists agree that the two sets of species are closely related, but they have different opinions as to how much evolution has occurred since the time of the most recent ancestor."¹ This divergence of opinion creates another hierarchical branch, one of which leads to an intellectual dead-end, wherein scientists are isolated from their kind, and the other of which leads to sweeping biological glory and fame.
Variety: This is from the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants: "Variety means a plant grouping within a single botanical taxon of the lowest known rank, which grouping, irrespective of whether the conditions for the grant of a breeder's right are fully met, can be defined by the expression of the characteristics resulting from a given genotype or combination of genotypes, distinguished from any other plant grouping by the expression of at least one of the said characteristics and considered as a unit with regard to its suitability for being propagated unchanged." Of course, clear reason tells us that one hierarchical level is preserved for economic integrity. No rational person would disagree with this. The survival of the investigator is essential to scientific progress, hence, intervention in taxonomic systems to preserve economic viability of keystone biologists is justified in this case. And we can state with a fair level of certainty that the anticipated adverse impacts of protected economic interests within the scientific method would be negligible or absent. Error reduction formulations are available to eliminate empirical data suggesting otherwise.
And it is understood, varieties can evolve into subspecies and subspecies can evolve into varieties, provided they are not economically viable or observed. This is verified by the observation that "Europeans tend to use subspecies and expect subspecies to occupy somewhat different areas whereas Americans use variety to denote plants that are different from the plants first put in the species. In practice, the two ranks are used almost interchangeably."² When economic viability is a concern, reclassification reverses the evolutionary process and preserves the investigator and thereby the community that supports him.
Thus, there is the possibility that, under extreme conditions, the non-competitive investigator may find himself mutating into a subspecies unless given protective status. In the absence of intervention, this has led to a disadvantageous condition, one that compels many scientists to flee the University settings and take refuge outside of the intellectual community, to dwell in shame and obscurity, reduced to mere shadows of men, thick-tongued brutes uttering maddening rhyme.
Form: "The rank of taxa below variety; the narrowest taxon; a plant which retains most of the characteristics of the species, but differs in some way such as flower or leaf color, size of mature plant, etc."³ At last! we reach the very bottom of living things, the point at which all scientists converge.
But wait. The Code states, "If a greater number of ranks of taxa is desired, the terms for these are made by adding the prefix sub- to the terms denoting the principle or secondary ranks. A plant may thus be assigned to taxa of the following ranks (in descending sequence): regnum, subregnum, divisio or phylum, subdivisio or subphyllum, classis, subclassis, ordo, subordo, familia, subfamilia, tribus, subtribus, genus, subgenus, sectio, subsectio, series, subseries, species, subspecies, vari-etas, subvarietas, forma, subforma."
And then, "The Code also requires that plant diversity be summarized in a hierarchical structure. Again it is not a question of whether such a structure really exists. the fact that the Code assumes the existence of a species and a hierarchical structure does not mean that the assumptions are correct, merely that, in naming plants one must act as if species are real and nature is hierarchical."²
Eureka!
History may write about the great Evolutionist Wars of the 21st century; the dynamic epoch when swarms of heavily-armed Darwinians battled one another on college campuses around the globe.
May the fittest scientist win!

¹ Mauseth, James D. 2003. Botany: An Introduction to Plant Biology. Jones and Bartlett Publishers, Sudbury, MA.
² Utah State University Herbarium
http://www.herbarium.usu.edu/teaching/4420/botnom.htm
³ GardenWeb
http://glossary.gardenweb.com/glossary/nph-ind.cgi?k=leaf

Television Bites Man

2007-10-24T22:10:00.000-07:00

As I lean forward in my armchair, straining to filter the truth about some swollen, beer- gorged celebrity from the composite wisdom of six psychotherapists, one journalism major, and the obligatory, disbarred legal counsel, all expressed in manifold, high-rise discord, I am struck by the fact that this person has made a career out of convincing observers that he is someone other than he really is.

Now this has great implications, only one of which I am aware of. So long as I am convinced he is actually someone else, I would never really meet him, or her for that matter, despite having spoken to and glad-handed with his closest companion, who, sad to say, doesn't know the first thing about this person behind him making him do all of this prattle. Wait a second, aren't you taller in real life? Who speaks to me?

I will continue to bark at the television screen hoping for answers.

Well, then, the television screen barks back, and it is an argument again. Then I see this statement flash before me: 'Atmospheric CO2 enrichment is a boon to the biosphere and it brings prosperity and growth to both man and nature.' I fall back into my chair. Wow. Who said that? I think I get it: we are steadily improving our lot in life through the production of unique polymers, odorless gases, and inorganic wastes. Yes! The best is yet ahead! Wait until you see what we wheel out of our laboratory tomorrow!

Why, look, it's more of us!

This reminds me of the words of H. W. Campbell in his landmark work, Campbell's 1907 Soil Culture Manual - A Complete Guide To Scientific Agriculture as Adapted to the Semi-Arid Region. ¹ This was a book that inspired thousands of people in the early 20th century to migrate to the western Great Plains in the United States to farm the land. It gave detailed instructions on dryland farming technique. If one followed his instructions closely, Mr. Campbell claimed:

"Science in soil culture and the more perfect adaptation of scientific methods to farming would result in doubling the crops in the great semi-arid belt of America. In later years I have made the statement still stronger and have declared, to the amazement of some of the doubting ones, that crops have not been one-fourth of what they should have been in this region."

This sounds familiar. But there is more - his book is 320 pages long.

"God speed the day when the people will realize that these vast plains were not intended to be mere grazing lands for the few cattle companies, but that they will give support to many small herds and flock cared for by many men, and that all the grass and cereals of the best agricultural regions of the earth will be grown here in abundance."

Somewhere on earth, an alarm goes off. Wait, does he mean to say that this scientific method only works with the assistance of God? Was he ex-cathedra when he said this? I need to know.

"A few years hence and the so called 'plains' or 'Great American desert' of the map makers will be dotted with splendid farm houses and great red barns. There will be rows of trees for wind-breaks and shade. There will be orchards and gardens...Looking far into the future one may see this region dotted with fine farms, with countless herds of blooded animals grazing, with school houses in every township, with branch lines of railroads, with electric interurban trolley lines running in a thousand directions, with telephone systems innumerable, with rural mail routes reaching to every door. It is coming just as sure as the coming of another century. The key has been found and the door to riches has been unlocked. How many millions will be supported upon this region? Nobody knows. But the day will come when those who tell of the hesitancy of their forefathers about trying to subdue this region will have to modify the truth if they are to be believed."

Exhibit A:

I like to imagine that Mr. Campbell was never seen again. But if I were to meet him, I wouldn't recognize him anyway.

¹ No longer in print, rarely seen anywhere, but available from Internet Archive.

All For Naught

2007-10-16T20:52:00.000-07:00

I hear that they say that canoeists are released at staggered intervals when entering the Boundary Waters, in order to prevent an accumulation of canoeists at the entry points. This can be an unsightly mess. Yet, there are days that seem to drop off of the calendar from time to time and I have wondered if this would solve the problem. Would this improve canoe entanglement, traffic flow, rental shortages, even airplane arrival times? I use these events, or the absence of these events, to plan my week and I have found that it greatly reduces stress and eliminates a lot of work. So, having planned nothing every other day, a lot less than nothing gets done on my day off than were I to be working. This is why I hired myself, and, of course, to keep me company on off days.
So we were in North Dakota for the last half of September, shuffling about the relentless prairie. We never seem to find what we are looking for.

The Botanist, seeking absolutely nothing.

This is not always the case, but it is most often the case. Again, they say that 'the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.' I have wondered about this too. Suppose it is in a closed system, and all pieces of evidence are inspected and it is not found? Then what? Is it evidently absent? I don't know, but after walking though monocultures of invasive, adventive, noxious, introduced, and non-native species, I have to wonder, if it is not there, then is it not there? What should one expect in a field of Asiatic steppe grasses planted sixty years ago by terrified scientists? More terrified scientists? How rare are those?
As the fields turn white and shatter, and the soil blows along like a cat running from one's feet, and I see waves of heat rising from the prairie and the bones of bison protruding from a shale bank, I am terrified too; it seems that I am walking in the exact same steps that some agricultural agent did sixty years ago.
So I plod along talking to myself, while my wife listens in.

The Hired Hand, listening to absolutely nothing

Up From The Depths

2007-09-14T22:26:00.001-07:00

Now what's going on.

This is how you do an aquatic plant survey on Lac Vieux Desert. Rake in hand, you latch onto the bottom and hoist a fresh salad of sea plants fit for a merman king. Lac Vieux Desert is a large shallow lake, known as the headwaters of the mighty Wisconsin River, historic ricing grounds for the Chippewa Indians, where terrifying storms, churning within rogue low pressure cells spawned over northern Canada, stir the lake, raising dark man-sized forms that twist and twirl for a moment, then slip out of view. Like a mouscallonge feeding on ducklings, the lake swallowed up many hapless voyageurs bobbing on the surface. The ducklings remain to this day.
And so does the terror. It was captured in the song of the voyageur, which, to my surprise, was reproduced with astonishing realism, pensive angst, and seething umbrage, by the journeyman musician Craig Schmoller. As the haunting melody drifted across the still waters, one could imagine that it was 1825. Many old-timers gathered on the shoreline. Many were weeping. Many waved vigorously, as if to warn us of danger. And many turned and raced up toward their houses, just as their forefathers did when the storms approached. As we listened to the sound of doors slamming and windows latching, we looked to the northwest, expecting to see dark clouds on the horizon. But as you can see, it was all blue sky. It was only our imagination.

To Our Readers

2007-08-08T22:39:00.001-07:00

People stop me on the street everyday and say, ''Dave, you cannot write." Yes, if I could understand what they were saying, I could agree, but they manage to read it anyhow. But then, if only they could read, I would not be writing this. So we are even.

Anyhow, I came across this paragraph the other day, from the book, Plant Ecology, by Dr. Ernst-Detlef Schulze, Dr. Erwin Beck, and Dr. Klaus Muller-Hohenstein:

The stable isotope¹³C is another indicator showing that gases from fossil fuels enter the earth's atmosphere. In pre-industrial times, the so-called d¹³C value (atmospheric ¹³C/¹²C ratio compared with a standard) was -6.5%. Adding CO₂, depleted in ¹³C , from fossil C-sources has decreased the d¹³C by ca. 1% in the last 40 years.

This quote, from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, helps to explain:

Changes in the ¹³C/¹²C ratio of atmospheric CO₂ thus indicate the extent to which concurrent CO₂ variations can be ascribed to variations in biospheric uptake. The calculation also requires specification of the turnover times of carbon in the ocean and on land, because fossil fuel burning implies a continuous release of isotopically light carbon to the atmosphere. This leads to a lowering of the atmospheric ¹³C/¹²C isotope ratio, which takes years to centuries to work its way through the carbon cycle (Keeling et al., 1980; Tans et al., 1993; Ciais et al., 1995a,b).

As I watch the lakes up here sizzle, roil, and throw off steam and the lakeshores expand into lake basins and fish jump into the boat pre-cooked and ready to eat, I see this quote in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on August 7:

A drought stretching into its second year has dropped water tables so low in some areas of the state - particularly central and northern Wisconsin - that shorelines are growing daily, boats and motors are scraping bottom and docks sit idle...The problem is worst in what the Department of Natural Resources calls "seepage lakes," where there is no natural inlet or outlet of water. Also known as spring-fed lakes, water levels are regulated by rainfall and groundwater. Many of Wisconsin's 15,000-plus inland lakes are seepage lakes...It's no secret it's been dry in Wisconsin the past two years. Aside from a stingy number of raindrops, the drought has been compounded by a mild winter that left below-normal amounts of snow to melt and replenish groundwater tables. Plus warm winters meant lakes froze over later, allowing more water to evaporate, said Richard Lathrop, a DNR research limnologist.

And then this quote from a local paper, the Lakeland Times, on July 20:

Dr. John Magnuson, University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW) professor emeritus, gave a lecture explaining how climate change affects fish and other aquatic life at the Lakeland Union High School (LUHS) distance learning lab July 11...Magnuson's expertise is in the field of limnology, or the study of fresh, inland waters...Perhaps the most critical point Magnuson made during his lecture is that if annual temperature averages continue to get warmer, the fish, plants and animals unique to the Northwoods will either die or leave. According to Magnuson, if this trend continues, living in Wisconsin in the future will be more like living in a southern state. Magnuson said a report on climate change in the Great Lakes region made a prediction "of what Wisconsin might be like by the end of this century, and they said, "Well where in the United States does that climate now occur?' It occurs in Arkansas."

Well, that is enough for one night. Our latest travels took us to the badlands in the western Dakotas. Here is Amy on duty:

Jet Lag

2007-07-21T22:03:00.001-07:00

I am unable to tolerate air travel well. It is the disorientation and dizziness. I can always tell when it will happen. Somewhere at about 30,000 feet, I will look out the porthole and see, on the starboard side, several men in orange vests waving metal signs. This is about the time the Dramamine has begun to take hold. Then we bank into a turn, the men wave goodbye, and we go round about some flaring thunderhead and head in the general direction of Baffin Island. Invariably, somewhere at this juncture, the plane begins to gently sway, like a crib. But cribs are penitentiaries for children! Free the children! At this moment, the captain comes on the intercom and everybody looks at each other and wonder why he is hissing so badly, but actually, his voice is scrambled by the static from the thunderstorm and the orange flames of Aurora Borealis arching above. He tosses out some statistics - speed, time of arrival, the elevation, the cabin pressure, his hat size, the number of men bouncing off of the windshield, the depth of the frozen hydrogen accumulating on the wings - and then all of the sudden, the plane goes into a steep dive. Fortunately, it is about then that I have fallen asleep, and I do never get to see how we pull out of it.

I think of this because the summers are sort of like that plane ride, only on the ground. I wake up in the middle of the night and I do not know where I am. The next day I drive to the survey site and all the vegetation is gone, stripped by a hailstorm the night before. I call Amy on the walkie talkie and she does not know who I am. Tomorrow I am expecting there will be rare invisible tornadoes and we will find that all of our movements during the day were worked out by two men playing chess in the coffee shop in town, both of whom have criminal records.

So, let it be that what that may be. What I mean is, a couple weeks ago we were experiencing this in Montana!

And then this!

The Castle Mountains and the Firehole River. As far as I can tell, I believe that is where we were.

The Open Road

2007-07-07T21:01:00.000-07:00

The difficulty lies in the absence of spare time and an unwillingness to abandon the exercise of my inalienable and fundamental human and civil right to ride a bicycle. There are some pleasant trails up in these northwoods, all of which skirt freshwater lakes, most of which are clear, cold, and radiant and pay no mind if an overheated cyclist misses a turn and plunges headlong into the water, joining the struggle for the right to swim. What prevents us from breathing underwater? Who shackles us with lungs? Who is to say we are not meant to live beneath the ice? Who says the water is just for fish? Lets overthrow these scaly louts and take the seas for ourselves! Live free and die!
So, I regress: After the spring ephemerals, in early June there was some work on the Little Missouri National Grasslands by the quaint village of Medora, North Dakota. Here is a view of Amy being swallowed up by the roiling prairie.

But then, it was over, and for a while in June I worked up by the Boundary Waters, in Minnesota, on the Superior National Forest. This can be found up there:

It's the Pigeon River Falls.
Where is my bike.

Spring Ephemerals

2007-05-14T20:36:00.000-07:00

Well what do you know.
It is field season and my time is more limited than in other months, so it is counterproductive, galling, and disorienting for me to write at this time, so if this distorts and enfeebles my final reports, I can lay the blame squarely at my own two badly worn feet.

Anyhow, it is spring ephemeral time and this is some of what I have found:

Claytonia caroliniana - Carolina spring-beauty

Dicentra cucullaria - Dutchman's-breeches

Erythronium americanum - Troutlily

These were seen the past week in Sugar maple/Basswood forests in north central Wisconsin on the Chequamegon National Forest. The habitat type is - according to the Kotar Habitat Type Classification System definition key scheme system system - ATM, AH, and AOCa. A is for Acer, dominated by the Sugar maples. You can just make them out through the cloud of black flies.
If you want a definition of spring ephemerals, read this one from page 112 of John T. Curtis' masterpiece, The Vegetation of Wisconsin - An Ordination of Plant Communities:

"As the name implies, the ephemerals are of short duration, at least as far as their aboveground parts are concerned. They grow very rapidly in early spring, frequently while the last snows are still melting. Both flowers and leaves usually appear together. Full bloom and maximum leaf expansion occur before the trees have expanded their leaf buds. Fruits are ripened quickly, often within three weeks of anthesis. Photosynthesis must occur with great efficiency, since these plants make enough food to complete their life cycle and to provide reserves to last until the following spring in the brief period before the tree canopy develops. By the time the tree leaves are fully expanded in early June, the ephemerals have died back completely with no trace of leaves or fruit to be seen. All of them have some type of underground storage organ, either, a corm, a tuber, a bulb, or a fleshy rhizome."

Thus, the plant below is not a spring ephemeral, although it is out in force before the trees have leafed out. The problem is, it retains it's leaves past the spring season, and in so doing, shows that it is actually a shade plant rather than a spring ephemeral. The mockery! Knowing the distinction between true spring ephemerals and those that are mere shams is worth your while and will spare you a deluge of irate letters from the botanical elite. Anyhow, the impostor:

Trillium cernuum - Nodding trillium

That's all for now.

Very Big Shoulders

2007-03-20T18:41:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago we went to the big city of Chicago.
Under normal circumstances I have little reason to go down there, my parents notwithstanding. Although they have lived in the suburbs in the same house for some 53 years, they come up to the northwoods on regular and frequent intervals, sparing me the agony of a trip through urban blight. Yes, I admit it, some swear by the big cities, but I reserve my most bitter invective for them. I have little stomach for thrill of a high speed chase after a comfortable living that is just out of the reach of my increasingly diminished capacity, just like those shining lakes that appear in the distance on a highway in the hot summer sun and stay in the distance no matter how fast I drive or how long. Once darkness sets in, they elude me completely and by then, I am exhausted like all the other people who have been racing along, unaware that maybe they aren't running toward something, but away from something. And all that driving through a dense automobile matrix that displays no pattern, solution, or objective. At least any that I can determine, from my vantage.
So I digress and should have put that on the Parallel Planet, but the borders between these two blogs are inherently fuzzy; maybe this garden spot of the universe is no longer the place we imagine it to be.
Anyhow, this proved to be one of the most delightful trips to the Winded City that I can recall. And it was largely the result of a visit to the Shedd Aquarium and the Field Museum. And the company of some good friends, but I will spare you those details.
I had been to both places with Amy back in 1992, but I remember little from then. No matter, my memory has been filled with some astounding displays from both theatres. The Shedd gave a magnificent replication of the South American rain forest ecosystem, demonstrating the variances in ecology as the seasons progress from dry to wet. And the coral reef displays were great fun with sharks swimming overhead and bazillions of impossibly colorful fish. And plenty of knowledgeable volunteers and employees on hand. There were admirable attempts to educate the public about alien fish and plant species in North American waterways and lakes. We spoke with one staff member, Kurt Hettiger, who volunteered much information about his work in the aquarium and was enthusiastic about his projects dealing with the threat of alien species. Big thanks, Kurt.
Go, have a look.
The Field Museum was equally engaging, with Sue, the Tyrannosaurus rex fossil from South Dakota there to greet you with her big toothy smile as you enter the front doors. We had the pleasure of following a well-versed tour guide through the Egypt display. As a matter of course and professional interest, we gave time to the botanical, bird, and mammal displays. They hadn't changed much since 1992. This made me think about what it must cost to run the place. I noticed that a lot of the funding was voluntary. But the best displays of all were in the fossil alley, called the Evolving Planet. I could have stayed another day or two there if I had the time. They have some very impressive original and replica fossil dinosaurs there, from the Cretaceous period. Then there were the Megafauna, those super-sized Pleistocene epoch animals, many of which died off rather suddenly not many thousands of years ago. I stood before the Short Faced Bear and did not flinch. These were the marquee players. All were of interest to me because of our work in the western Dakota badlands where I have seen and handled both Pleistocene and Cretaceous fossils. I suppose this means that I can say that I have walked all the way to Hell Creek and back.
Go there too, if you can get through the gauntlet of traffic and haze. Maybe it isn't a big deal to you. Perhaps you have superior adaptive traits.
But my return to the city might be delayed for another 15 years. I realize that my metropolitan survival skills have atrophied through disuse and disinterest. In the concrete environment, being without natural defenses, I am vulnerable to many threats, much like the Mexican Hairless Dog that has wandered into the arctic tundra. Viral, animal, climatic, any force would overwhelm me. I tremble at the sight of a mere taxi. Voles gather at my feet. This is not good. There may be no place left to hide. As resources continue to dwindle, the monster of competitive economics will break out of the developed zone and lumber into this primitive landscape and tear apart my way of life. Doom peers over the horizon.
I should buy a factory-scented air freshener for my car.

Slim Buttes, South Dakota

2007-01-09T22:07:00.000-08:00

This past weekend we spent a few days hoofing about on Slim Buttes, South Dakota, in search of wild game.

These buttes have history. On September 8, 1876, Captain Anson Mills and 150 soldiers stumbled upon a camp of 25 to 30 lodges of Sioux and Cheyenne Indians on the eastern slopes of Slim Buttes. They attacked the following morning. At least ten Sioux and two cavalrymen died. This was only 11 weeks after the Battle of Little Bighorn. The battle site is about 8 miles southeast of Reva Gap. It is on private land.

These buttes have geology. They are Tertiary rocks and feature an outlier of the White River group, an Oligocene age badlands geology, most of which are found in southern South Dakota, western Nebraska, and eastern Colorado. You may remember seeing these rocks in Badlands National Park, where they form the famous mounds, spires, pinnacles, and hoodoos that draw millions to gawk and bake beneath the infernal badlands sun. Many end up languishing in Wall Drug, sloshing about, bellies full of ice water. But I digress.

Here we find two formations of the White River group, the Chadron and Brule. Above them lies the Arikaree formation, of more recent origin, deposited during the Miocene age. The White River group is underlian by Paleocene age Ludlow formation. The Ludlow formation contains lignites, and these coal veins were mined during the 1950's and 1960's for the urnanium they contained. Ground and surface water still contain elevated levels of uranium and there is concern about health hazards. Residents cite increased incidents of cancer.
The Arikaree formation contains "concretionary, cross-bedded, calcareous sandstones, siltstones, silty claystones, carbonates, and tuffaceous beds"¹, which is to say it has a lot of fine white sandstone and volcanic ash. It is ledge-forming, that is, it forms the cliffs that characterize the buttes. It is dramatic, a Ponderosa pine forest rising above the golden plains, perched atop sheer cliffs. One writer ranks Slim Buttes as one of the loveliest landscapes in South Dakota.²

Them is buttes alright.

The storied, seasoned, game hunter, Perry Dexter, spotting absolutely nothing, but what does it matter.

The Castles in Slim Buttes, a National Landmark.

Beneath the Arikaree formation cliffs. Trusted camp-hand Jim Nauertz is the dot in the center, living large.

¹ Hoganson, John W., Edward C. Murphy, Nels F. Forsman. 2006. Lithostratigraphy, Paleontology, and Biochronology of the Chadron, Brule, and Arikaree Formations in North Dakota. North Dakota Geological Survey, Bismarck, ND.

² Hogan, Edward Patrick, 1995. The Geography of South Dakota. Pinehill Press, Inc., Freeman, S.D.

A notice to our readers

2006-12-22T22:33:00.000-08:00

The three of you may be wondering what happended to all the fiction, fable, and myth that I had posted on this site. Maybe you aren't wondering. I assume that you are reading this right now, but how could I tell. At any rate, should you wonder, I migrated it to another blog. I might bring it all back here if I get a notion. I don't know. Some say it discredits me to have illusionary tales intermingled with hard science. They say the professional community would be appalled, flee in horror, blacklist me for life, banish me to a primitive hunter-gatherer existence played out in dumpsters across the land. There it is again. See, maybe I can't keep the stories out of here. Maybe I am doomed. Where is the park bench, I am coming home.
If you have any complaints, you can cope with them by various methods of stress management.

Captured on Film

2006-12-22T19:24:00.000-08:00

Well, here are more of the rare plants I came across this summer. These were found in Minnesota:

1) Arethusa bulbosa (Dragon's mouth), Superior National Forest, east of Ely, Minnesota. Found in a moderately rich fen¹ or Northern Rich Fen² or commonly called an open bog. I estimated something like 5000 of the plants.

2) Taxus canadensis (Canada yew), Superior National Forest, west of Grand Marais, Minnesota. There were thousands of these deer-mangled plants scattered across various wetlands. Most were Rich Conifer Swamps¹ or Northern Cedar Swamp².

3) Carex vaginata (Sheathed sedge), Superior National Forest, east of Ely, Minnesota. I found about four populations scattered about the district. These are not rare in Minnesota, but are rare in Wisconsin. Nevertheless, it was a treat to find it. Again, Rich Conifer Swamp¹ or Northern Cedar Swamp².

4) Dryopteris fragrans (Fragrant Fern), Superior National Forest, east of Ely, Minnesota. Two plants on a rock outcrop. Not rare in Minnesota, but rare in Wisconsin. Fragrant when the frond is crushed, hence the name.

5) Platanthera hookeri (Hooker's orchid), Superior National Forest, east of Ely, Minnesota. In Aspen/Birch/Fir forest, a rat's nest of dead and fallen confiers, dense Hazelnut, Aspen suckers, and Fir seedlings, a forest type that is ubiquitous in the Great Lakes region, and fire dependent. The orchid is not rare in Minnesota, but is in Wisconsin.

¹A. G. Harris and others, 1996. Field Guide to the Wetland Ecosystem Classification for Northwestern Ontario. Northwest Science and Technology. Thunder Bay, Ontario.

² Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, 2003. Field Guide to the Native Plant Communties of Minnesota: the Laurentian Mixed Forest Province. MNDNR. St. Paul, MN.

Reports Online

2006-12-12T23:56:00.000-08:00

We managed to upload some of our survey reports to our website. They are:

Rare Plant Status Report - Eriogonum visheri - 2004
A survey and report on the ecology of Dakota buckwheat on the Grand River National Grasslands in South Dakota. Funded by the USFS and the Dakota Prairie Grasslands.

Rare Plant Status Survey - Eriogonum cernuum, Collinsia parviflora, Phlox alyssifolia, Townsendia hookeri - 2003
A survey and report on the ecology of Nodding buckwheat, Blue-eyed Mary, Hooker's townsendia, and Alyssum-leaved phlox on the Little Missouri National Grasslands in North Dakota. Funded by the USFS and the Dakota Prairie Grasslands.

Rare Plant Status Survey - Chenopodium subglabrum - 2002
A survey and report on the ecology of smooth goosefoot on the Little Missouri National Grasslands in North Dakota. Funded by the USFS and the Dakota Prairie Grasslands.

I will see if I can include one of the reports from 2006, on Western Prairie Fringed Orchid, or Platanthera praeclara. We did a 3627 acre survey in southeastern North Dakota for the Natural Heritage Program. We found a mess of plants.
In 2005 we didn't produce any big reports, just a lot of field data. And one of the surveys was over a two year period, so the report will not be out until early 2007.
All reports have been sanitized, that is, cleared of any location specifications so as to deter poaching, vandalism, sabotage, desecration, and other acts of rank hooliganism.

Of rare trees and flying creatures

2006-11-28T14:17:00.000-08:00

The end of field season 2006 as we know it.
Five federal land offices were involved: Chequamegon National Forest, Superior National Forest, Sheyenne National Grasslands, Grand River National Grasslands, and Little Missouri National Grasslands. All were rare plant surveys. Species we encountered this season included Eriogonum visheri, Townsendia hookeri, Platanthera praeclara, Platanthera hookeri, Taxus canadensis, Cynoglossum boreale, Utricularia resupinata, Dryopteris fragrans, Carex vaginata, and Arethusa bulbosa. There are photos of all of these at our website.
The season extended into October this year, a welcome bonus of field work. Normally, at these latitudes, October brings stiff winds from Alberta that sweeps you from the field like a mother driving field mice from the kitchen, and the obsession with rare forbs quickly becomes an obsession with rare trees, particularly dead and dry oak trees, difficult to find where so many heat with wood. Maybe they should put the dead oaks on the protected list, then put exclosures around them to prevent overconsumption by firewood cutters, which might allow the dead oaks to bounce back, get a good population base, and maybe we could see some reproduction and their numbers would just take off.
A new client knocked on our door gave us a 3400 acre survey in tallgrass prairie in eastern North Dakota, on the Sheyenne National Grasslands. This was a first. Plus, it was for a federally listed species, Platanthera praeclara, or Western Prairie Fringed Orchid. Big plant, up to the knee, with a spiral arrangement of lacerated white flowers. The whole colony was in bloom when we arrived and we took it to be a heroe's welcome. I guess we will be working there next year too. The only drawback of that area is the wave of biting insects. This was a very hot and dry summer, as are so many of late, and the insects were driven underground or into an office environment- or somewhere, because we saw only a handful. But some of the old-timers say that, in years gone by, the sun would be darkened at midday by the clouds of black flies overhead. They say you would just point your shotgun into the air at random, pull the trigger, and thousands would fall from the sky. Children would run around collecting baskets filled with the critters and it wasn't long before they made a contest over who could collect the most. Like cattle to a watering hole, the young lads would stream into the village from across the county, all proud grins and Sunday best as they presented their baskets brimming with spoil. The winning child would be presented with a gift by the mayor and his parents would be honored at a banquet at the town hall that night. Kindling was heaped high beneath giant black kettles, the fires were lit, and the kettles soon roiled with the stew. The great Black Fly Feed was on! All were put in a most gleeful mood, the fiddles would come out, the legs would shake, the corn mash would pour, hands would slap, and a revelry would carry on until daybreak. Tumult indeed! Chores would be deferred, school would be cancelled, and the following day would be declared one of rest. Black fly season would last for three months in this region, and so too the revelries. This custom is widely recognized as one of the primary causes of the widespread crop failures, bankruptcies, and mass exodus from the Great Plains during the 1930's.

But it wasn't my idea

2006-08-28T23:10:00.000-07:00

I don't know what I am doing here, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.