Dr. Metablog

My Career as a Dowser

When we built the summer house/cabin/hovel in 1977, we needed to dig a well, and someone, probably the plumber, hired a dowser. I didn’t approve – I would have hired a credentialed hydraulic engineer. For me, dowsers belongs in the same crazy box as astrologers, phrenologists, flat-earthers, Shakespeare-author conspiracists, along with the lunatics who report on visits to the earth by ancient astronauts. Nevertheless, a dowser arrived, an elderly gentleman. Curiously, he dowsed with an old pair of rusted pliers rather than the traditional forked willow stick. He was an enthusiast for his trade and, ignoring my skepticism, showed my how to cut a willow and exactly how to hold it. After he left, I tried it out. A most odd experience, one of the oddest in my life, then took place. As I walked about, brandishing the rod, from time to time the tip of the willow would turn suddenly down. Not in a subtle way, but forcefully and dramatically – strongly enough to redden and even slightly cut the palms of my hands.  

Even more strange -- if I handed the willow to another person and he or she walked about, nothing happened. Nothing, that is, until I held that person's wrist. Then the dowsing rod went all crazy and twisted downward out of the holder's hands. 

It was a wondrous incredible experience and is vivid in my memory now these fifty years. But it was a one time only event.

Every once in a while, over the decades, just for fun, I would cut a piece of willow and walk about, but I’ve never been able to reproduce the phenomenon. The dowsing rod doesn’t dowse, doesn’t do anything at all;  just behaves like an ordinary piece of wood. 

I don't believe in dowsing. I don't believe that you can find underground water, or even underground electric wires as some think, by walking about with a piece of willow in your hands.  On the other hand, I know that something peculiar and very real happened to me that one time. Was there water underground. I don't know, but I know that I wouldn't dig a hole on the basis of that fleeting evidence. I am a man of reason, or at least I like to think so.

Incidentally, the place that the 1977 dowser picked out for us to dig was a great success. We've enjoyed a bounteous  supply of water for all these many years. 

But now that I know more about wells than I did half a century ago, I can read the landscape well enough to recognize that the dowser picked an obvious place to dig a well -- with or without the help of his magical pliers.

The "bottlebrush buckeye"

As a youth, I spent many a happy hour in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. One of the plantings that I remember vividly was what I conceived of as a "wall" of bottlebrush buckeyes. It's been many a year, but what stands in my memory is roughly 40 or 50 linear feet of 20-foot-tall decorative shrubs in full flower.

So naturally, when I came to West Bradford, I tried to reproduce the effect. I just happened to have a perfect spot for a wall of buckeyes -- a fertile slope of the proper size and shape. In 1980 (plus or minus a year or so) I purchased two such plants from White Flower Farm in Connecticut and set them 30 feet apart, optimistically hoping that over the course of the years they would expand to fill in the allotted space.  

It did not happen. One of the plants lingered for a year or so before giving up the ghost; the other stood still -- grew a bit, then died back over the winter. Our Zone 3 Vermont weather proved to be too harsh for a plant that had thrived in Zone 6 Brooklyn. I resigned my self to the fact that my experiment with the bottlebrush buckeye was a failure.

But then perhaps 10 years ago, after decades of stagnancy, the plant began to increase in size. Global warming?  Wetter summers? Maturity? I can't say. And then this past summer, after forty-plus years of doing virtually nothing, the bottlebrush buckeye produced some flowers. And there they are -- long awaited and very welcome!

(The purplish plant in the background is Joe Pye weed, eutrochium purpureum, which thrives and multiplies without the least bit of assistance from me. And also a 20-year-old weeping willow and young Eastern cottonwood, which I set in place about 5 years ago.)

This past summer, dazzled that the buckeye produced its extravagant flowers at last, I gave it a few hours of care. Weeded it, pruned away the dead growth,  and gave it a small optimisitc dose of 10-10-10 fertilizer. I'm very curious to see what happens next summer. Could it be that my 40-year old experiment will succeed at last?

My Life with Telephones

In the course of my lifetime, the telephone has gone from relatively rare to ubiquitous, from wall to pocket, and from rotary dial to cell. From no intelligence whatsoever to smart and then to very smart. Revolutionary changes.

When I was growing up in Flatbush, our family was prosperous enough to have a telephone (not everyone did), but the device was only employed for local calls, never for "long distance." Non-local calls were prohibitively expensive and were only for deaths. To be called to the phone by long-distance was ominous.

Before the innovation of seven-digit dialing, we were Windsor 6-2077. Sometime after WWII, our exchange was altered from WI 6 to GEdney 6. To me, this was an early indication that the world was unstable and would be filled with ups and downs. One day we were a Windsor, a royal house, and the next day we were a Gedney, a brand of dill pickle. 

Every telephone in existence looked exactly like this one.  The idea that they would ever look otherwise was inconceivable.  

For a month of so in the late 1950s, I had a job operating an old-fashioned switchboard at the Sears warehouse on Utica Avenue -- definitely my most satisfying telephone-related experience, lifetime. Ah that lovely click when the plug fully entered its receptacle! A delight!  The one I sat at looked almost exactly like this:

In my short time at the console, I became quite a proficient operator, only cutting off important calls a handful of times. It's hard to believe that such an antiquated-looking machine was still in use when I was a lad.

We must also recall the almost extinct telephone booth -- often out of order, because someone wielded a crowbar to make off with nickels and dimes. And smelly. Plus, one never had the right change when needing it most.  I do not mourn the passing of the phone booth.

When we moved to Vermont in 1968, the Topsham Telephone Company had not yet switched to seven digit dialing. Our home number was high-prestige 21, but we were jealous of the family whose number was 9. Ours was a four-party line -- also a thing of the past. I wonder whether my grandchildren have ever heard the phrase "party-line."  Or "rotary dial," for that matter.

When AT&T was deregulated and the market was thrown open to innovation, there came a great explosion of telephone styles. Phones blossomed into many odd colors and configurations. For a while, we owned one of these:

The Simpson phone was not my initiative but that of one of the younger members of the family.

But more change was in the works. The prediction that there would be pocket phones in the future seemed fantastical science fiction-y.  All phones had to be connected with wires -- otherwise how could the sound get out of the wall and into the handset. I scoffed.

Nowadays, everyone carries a cell phone. But it's not just a phone -- it's a computer. It does everything -- perhaps too much. There is substance to the frequently heard complaint that some individuals, especially young 'uns, relate more readily to their cell than to the person sitting next to them. It's a paradox: with more potential communication comes more loneliness. I myself must admit that there's a fascination to the cell phone that is disarming.  I'm trying not be allow myself to be addicted. But there is something wonderful about a machine that lets you not only speak with but to actually see your daughter, who is a thousand miles away. Not a trick that a rotary phone could perform.

Not to be an alarmist or a Luddite, there's a serious downside to the cell. It seems as though the machine  might be reorganizing youthful brains-- with unknown consequences,

Scenes like this one have become scarily familiar:

Look up, children, look up! Please look up!

Turtles and Metempsychosis

I would not want to be reincarnated as a turtle. Not at all.

Should it happen that I were to be reincarnated, I would prefer to return as one of those great sea birds -- the Wandering Albatross or the Great Frigatebird  or the Northern Fulmar -- that cruise for hundreds of miles over the Pacific -- soaring effortlessly, joyriding the thermals, blissfully savoring the salt spray at dawn and dusk. It would be glorious -- although not entirely without a downside, because if I were such a bird I would have to sustain myself on a repulsive sushi diet of raw fish. Yeesh.

But to live the next or a subsequent life as a turtle -- what a grim unpleasant prospect! Turtles do not soar; they're earthbound, and they move so slowly that they're almost immobile. At very best, they slog or plod. It's not that they're unsuccessful in their own way; after all, they've been around for 200 million years. Generations, therefore, have plod, have plod, have plod. But is there a creature on earth whose bodily configuration is more limiting, more dictatorial? Turtles spend a lifetime schlepping carapace and plastron up and down hills or over the desert sands. How can an animal constrained to eternally lug an outsize ponderous shell experience any kind of freedom or joy? 

Besides, turtles are ridiculously ugly. 

 

Bulky thick inelegant legs ending in frightening claws. Absurd useless tails. Toothless gaping mouths. Prominent nostrils, wrongly placed. Horrid corrugated necks. No ears, none at all. Foolish, fatuous expression. The only part of the turtle that might be considered attractive is the carapace (when it's not coated with slimy vegetation or studded with leeches), but in the entire history of the planet, no turtle has ever been able to admire its own integument. 

 

Imagine being reincarnated as a creature so imperfectly designed that it can't regain its legs when tipped onto its back. If I were a turtle, I would hate that. Legs flailing in the air. Undignified. Double yeesh.

 

Plus, many turtles eat worms.

 

Moreover, if I or someone dear to me were to become a turtle -- it's going to be a long haul, reincarnation-wise. Let's say, for example, that you were to be born again as a dung beetle -- why, you would endure a very unsavory couple of months, but then -- on you would go to the next life. Once reincarnated as a turtle, however, you're liable to be stuck in that ungainly shell for a century. And worse still -- some turtles "brumate" for half their lives. That's a heck of a lot of time to spend in a state of suspended animation. In addition -- and this is rather shocking -- some turtles extract oxygen from water through their "cloaca." I can't imagine how they do that, and, frankly, "'twere to consider too curiously to consider so." Not to mention turtle sex. Do turtles cuddle or snuggle? It must be quite an accomplishment to work around those massive clanking  shells. 

 

So no turtle reincarnation for me. But to tell truth, I find reincarnation itself, like most religious or quasi-religious ideas, utterly baffling. I presume it works something like this. I die, my soul is released from my corpse and immediately enters into a new body -- in this case a newly fertilized turtle egg. (I have no idea how this process works -- but let's all agree that it does). Immediately, there's a glitch. Turtle gender is not determined in the usual way, by XX and XY genes. Turtle gender is a consequence of the temperature at which the embryos develop inside the eggshell. Warm, male; cool, female (or vice versa in some species). What this means is that if my soul was infused or assimilated or injected into a turtle egg, it would not be immediately known whether I was going to be a boy turtle or a girl turtle. I don't really care, frankly; there's not much advantage to being one or the other. Turtles are not particularly sexually dimorphic and both genders are equally hideous. But I would like to know right away and not have to wait on some quirk of the weather. 

 

Reincarnation puzzles me for still another reason. How can I be sure that I haven't already been reincarnated? Perhaps I was a turtle (or an albatross) in a past life. I don't remember being other than I am, but how can I be certain? 

 

Or, to switch points of view, perhaps one of the turtles pictured above was once, let us imagine, Ragnar Naess (1900-1972), a bachelor sorghum farmer from O'Neill, Nebraska. Or even one of my less brainy former colleagues. How could we determine it; how could the turtle know it? If it's undeterminable, why does it matter?

 

Gosh, reincarnation is a tough nut to crack.

 

[December 15, 2022. Pearl Maneli writes: "I believe current reincarnation theory explains that your soul wouldn't transmigrate into a turtle at the moment of conception; it would do so only when the turtle hatches from the egg. So you can let your mind rest easy on the question of your turtle gender."]

 

[December 16. Vivian de St. Vrain responds: "Thanks, Pearl. I am much relieved"]

Anemoia

The premise of Riley Black's The Last Days of the Dinosaurs (New York, 2022) is a most splendid one. Imagine, she proposes, that it is 66 million years ago and dinosaurs are the monarchs of the earth. What was it like, in that era, to be alive in, say, the steamy forests where Wyoming now lies -- a world in which club-tailed ankylosaurs were tracked by tyrannosaurs while primitive mammals scuttled in the ferny underbrush. Rich and strange, certainly. And then, how was it all transformed on "the worst day in the history of the planet" when the Chicxulub asteroid plowed into the Yucatan? One fine day, the dinosaurs were triumphant; and then in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, the six-mile-wide asteroid crash lands and everything goes all kablooey -- the sure and firm-set earth shakes, the atmosphere turns furnace hot, and acid rain and smoke and fire and tsunamis snuff out 80 per cent of our planet's animal species.

It's a fabulous idea for a masterpiece of science writing, and consequently I'm grieved to report that The Last Days of the Dinosaurs is a disappointing book. It is loose and melodramatic and outrageously padded -- a thirty page essay turned into a swollen three hundred page opus. It's much too pop; it's insufficiently serious and therefore leaves poor frustrated me craving data and detail rather than reiteration. Who could believe that the high drama of Chicxulub could become quite so tedious? I put the blame on Ms. Black's literary agent, who, I have no shadow of doubt, advised her to "turn your idea into a book, and keep it easy -- not too technical -- you'll sell a lot more copies."

What a shame, because Black is well-informed and writes with intermittent flair. She loves her reptiles, and in particular displays genuine warmth, almost reverence, for every young person's favorite dinosaur, the tyrannosaurus rex. An infatuation that lingers from her childhood, I suspect. I myself, not similarly transfixed, might have supposed that T. Rex had been expelled from the Terrible Lizard Hall of Fame sometime in the 1990s, when it came to be gospel that the 60-foot tall monster was not a top-of-the-food-chain predator but merely a snuffling scavenger. Was it not revealed to us that the creature's meager brain was dwarfed by its olfactory bulbs, so that it could effortlessly detect decaying flesh over the unbounded western landscapes? And was it not also agreed that its puny forelegs were useless for pursuit or attack? Black will have nothing of such paleontological revisionism. Her T. Rex is a hunter, lurking in ambush to pounce and to crunch with one powerful bite the enormous protuberant osteoderms that protected the stegosaurus spine. To me, the idea that a beast as gigantic as a tyrannosaurus could conceal itself behind bush or boulder and sneakily lunge at its prey seems totally ludicrous.

Black, bless her kindly heart, firmly embraces the unrevised T. Rex. Her loyalty is transcendent. In a burst of psychological overkill, she describes her crush on the dinosaur as an example of anemoia. And what, readers rightly ask, is anemoia?  It's an unfamiliar word that describes a baffling concept. Upon investigation,"anemoia" turns out to be a recent coinage, a "fire-new" word (as WS, in LLL, calls such innovations). It's "a nostalgia for a time one has never known," such as Black seems to feel about the years and days that preceded Chicxulub. And here I must once again reveal my want of imagination. Anemoia, however hard I labor to grasp the idea, is too subtle for my downright brain. Isn't it the case that "nostalgia" is by definition a cherishing of something in one's own personal history, as such a one as I might remember with warmth a concert or a wedding or that long ago glorious day in which I, batting leadoff, started the game with a triple to right field.

I can't quite fathom a nostalgia for something I've not known in my own person. The emotion that Black describes I would call simple curiosity. I'm as intrigued as the next guy about the past and I can certainly summon a yearning to have been present at some great historical event, but I wouldn't call it anemoia. For example, I might wish that I had been at Fenway on September 30, 1960, the day that Ted Williams blasted a home run on his very last time at bat -- but I wasn't there and it would be a falsehood to claim otherwise. [Full disclosure: I was in attendance, just behind third base, the previous day, September 29, and therefore missed the moment by a scant twenty-four hours.] Unlike Black, I'm not anemoiac about the dinosaur-dominated world of the K-P boundary, but I have other anemoiac -- as I've now redefined the word -- yearnings.

My most pressing and immediate wish would be to have joined the crowd at a performance at the Globe Theatre in London, perhaps of Hamlet in 1599 or Macbeth in 1606. Why? Because even though Shakespeare's works have been studied microscopically for more than 400 years, no one really knows how those plays originally looked or sounded. My suspicion is that they were far more foreign, more strange, less realistic and more primitive than scholars recognize. After all, the most brilliant play ever written, King Lear, was performed in daylight and the actors had to project their voices to a crowd of 2000 people, many of them shuffling about, gossiping, and cracking hazelnuts. No sets, no curtains, no lighting, and no scenery to speak of. I'd guess that the cast employed a style of dramaturgy closer to its medieval inheritance of allegorical representation than we like to admit. Furthermore, I am convinced that if I were present there at the actual Globe, I would discover an endless series of unknown unknowns. Unimaginable unknowns, that would knock our anemoiac socks off. The past is another country; they do things a heck of a lot differently there.

But wait! My dormant anemoia, now aroused, yearns to experience in my own person other events in the past. Where else to indulge my wants? Certainly in Athens, at a performance of a play by Sophocles -- which I can guarantee to be a hundred times stranger than anything London could possibly offer.

But why only the arts?  Now that I think of it, I would love to take a gander at forested Manhattan Island when Henry Hudson's Half Moon made its first landfall. I could have talked to the Lenapes; tried to warn them about the dangers that were coming down the pike. And there's much more. Just prior to struggling through The Last Days of the Dinosaurs, I read Marie Favereau's The Horde (2021), a most fascinating history of the Mongol civilization that conquered and controlled the area from Hungary in the west to Korea in the east during the 13th century and the first half of the 14th. Favereau's depiction of the Mongols was novel and disorienting, essentially because I'm accustomed to think about great empires as centered on a dominant imperial city -- Athens, Rome, London. I believe that I understand a little of what life might have been like in Rome; after all, I've read some of the ancient historians and I know a bit about cities. I've even toured Pompeii, for goodness sake! But the Mongols did not live in cities; they were not particularly literate, they were unabashedly polygamous, animist, and almost entirely nomadic. It's a challenge to imagine a "city" of a hundred thousand people in constant migratory motion. When Mongol men went to war, which they seemed to do often and always, they brought along the women and children, the cattle-drawn carts and wagons and the felt tents along with their horses, goats and sheep. To spend time with a wandering horde, an entirely unfamiliar form of civilization, and to try to understand their mental world, would certainly challenge and enlarge my (and your) conception of what it means to be a human being.

Favereau doesn't dwell on such speculations (she is more concerned with military history than social or psychological matters) but nevertheless the ways in which the migrants related to each other and to their environment had to be entirely foreign to us mostly urban, post Age of Reason moderns. What was it like to be a Mongol? Perhaps I feel this question personally because a recent examination of my DNA tells me that I'm 1% Asian by genetic inheritance. I assume, naturally, that like approximately 16,000,000 other people, I'm directly descended from Mongol leader Chinggis (formerly Genghiz) Khan through one of his seven wives or his innumerable concubines. Is it anemoia, a recognition of my kinship to Grandpa Genghiz, that has produced in me, this morning, such a wildness in the blood? Or is it the caffeine?

In actual fact, although I'm most curious about Mongol life, I don't think that I would have made a good nomad. In the first place, I suffer from serious directional disabilities and would no doubt promptly misplace myself on the vast and featureless Eurasian steppe; and secondly, I lack enthusiasm for subsisting on kumis, the fermented mare's milk which was the staple of the Mongol diet.

Let me now admit that while I indulge some pseudo-anemoia for my distant Mongol forebears, I feel much closer to my more recent Ukrainian shtetl ancestors. If I could be plopped down in the western Ukraine, I might be able to absorb the texture of life in Staroconstantinov in 1895, just before brave Isaiah and Eta set out for America.  As things stand, I know almost nothing of any importance about the lives of my eastern European ancestors. How did these resilient folks survive centuries, millennia,  of dearth, disease and pogroms? What did they eat? Where did they sleep? What, indeed, did they do for "fun," if they had any conception of fun? What did they read? How did the sexes relate to each other? How did they find privacy? And most significantly: how seriously did they embrace that narrow, all-encompassing and demanding religion?

A nineteenth-century shtetl seems impossibly foreign and faraway, but in the longer time frame, it's actually very recent. The most distant past that we can readily imagine is when the archeological record begins to appear -- perhaps five thousand year ago. But my and your fully human ancestors migrated from the Olduvai Gorge some 60,000 years ago, which leaves approximately 55,000 years without any data at all -- or at least nothing beyond the merest occasional trace. For these many millennia our forbears lived in world where there were no cities, no writing, no pottery, no weaving, no domesticated plants or animals, no metals, no wheels and therefore no vehicles -- only stone hand axes and later spears and much later still bows and arrows. Two thousand five hundred precarious generations of foraging! I would like to see for myself how our common ancestors managed to survive when the gigantic short-faced bear competed for the cave and the terrifying European lion lurked in the shadows. I suspect also that the most dangerous predator our g g g... grandfathers faced was the tribe next door -- otherwise why would we have inherited such hostility to people who look or act just slightly differently than ourselves. Wouldn't it be profoundly anemoiac to join a family of our mutual forebears for a week or two and participate with them as they went about their lives?

What a treasure-trove of unknown unknowns would we confront!

The Ocellated Turkey

Turkeys, I was recently surprised to learn, come in two distinct species. The familiar one is the "wild turkey", Meleagris gallopavo, the big bird that in broods of twenty or so, wanders around my house and garden, eating seeds, insects, acorns and apples and occasionally leaving behind a fancy feather or two. 

They're new to the neighborhood. Until about twenty years ago, I had not seen a single turkey; now, they're everywhere. And bold. Or perhaps just indifferent to me.  

And then there's the second kind of North American turkey. It's rare -- found, nowadays, only in the Yucatan peninsula. It's the "ocellated turkey,"  and it's one heck of a fancy bird.

 

Ocellated? I was puzzled, stymied by this unfamiliar word. But then I remembered that an "ocellus" is an architectural term. An ocellus is the circular opening at the top of a dome, familiar to me from its celebrated use in the Roman Pantheon. "Ocellus" is obviously the diminutive of Latin "oculus," eye. It follows that an "ocellated turkey" is so called because it displays circular markings on its feathers, like a peacock (although none of the pictures of turkeys that I found on the internet revealed eye-like decorations. Many shimmering colors, however.

 

It's remarkable that the range of the "ocellated turkey" coincides with the habitat of the ocelot. Could such a turkey, if attacked and killed by an ocelot, be considered doubly ocellated"? And if, in its death throes, it thrashed and quivered, could it be said to oscillate?

In Praise of Hands

A few weeks ago, I found myself absentmindedly working in the perennial garden. I had wandered nearby and noted some weeds that needed emergency extirpation. I had therefore arrived without my usual trine of implements -- the dandelion puller, the hand shovel, and the Felco #2. Too lazy to fetch them, I began to tend to the plants toollessly and at the same time to muse upon effectiveness of hands alone. (Weeding often leads to musing, as every weeder knows.)  Is it not the case that the best tool of all is the human hand?  Because my garden soil is so friable, I was able to dig into the earth with my unaided index finger, grasp the roots of weeds and pull them. I wondered how the hand had come to so sensitive to small changes in soil temperature or soil moisture. Sensitive also, to the texture of things, so that I could identify the roots of witch grass, and remove them, while leaving untouched the very similar but different roots of the day lilies. For no good reason, my wayward mind wandered to the Houyhnhnms whom Gulliver outrageously claimed could grasp a needle between fetlock and pastern in order to sew garments. Amusing but impossible. The hooves of horses are wonderfully evolved for galloping but not for tatting or crocheting. Besides, why would a horse want to darn a sock? 

Our hands are superior implements  There's not another animal on the planet that can tie its own shoelaces. 

I've just read a fascinating book by paleontologist Madelaine Bohme called Ancient Bones. Bohme is concerned to argue that the "out of Africa" hypothesis needs modification. I am not knowledgeable enough to accept or deny her thesis, but I much appreciate her effort to bring me up to date about the evolution of our species, which is much more complicated -- infinitely more complicated -- than the story we were told just a generation ago.

Bohme includes a couple of speculative pages about the evolution of the hand. First came bipedalism, freeing the hands for a variety of new tasks. Bohme thinks that the development of stone tools and the development of hands went, so to speak, hand in hand. The need to hold the tool meant that the hand evolved to hold it properly -- with an opposable thumb of course. More sensitive fingers conferred an evolutionary advantage. More information from the fingers caused the somatosensory cortex, which controls the hands, to enlarge and process more sensations.

So now we can play the piano, thread a needle, throw a ball, type a letter, weed a garden, and perform a thousand other tasks that even chimpanzees, who apparently do not have great sensory input from their fingers, cannot do.

Bohme does not discuss the role of hands in human communication, either everyday or erotic.  A topic for another book, perhaps.

Best Garden Advice

I read a story in an "art of gardening" book many years ago that I will repeat here. A famous Japanese gardener, a "national treasure," was asked, "What's the secret of making a garden as beautiful as yours?" He didn't answer in words but lifted his arms and made a shearing or lopping motion. 

Many years ago, I asked Roy Huse, who had a most wonderful vegetable garden at the foot of South Road how he did it.  He said, and I quote verbatim, "you really got to put the shit to it."

And from my father: "it's all about preparing the bed before you plant."

So, don't skimp on getting the bed ready, add plenty of manure, and be ruthless about cutting things out.

And o yes, you'll need sun and water.

Trees Old and New

When we arrived here 54 years ago, the land was heavily forested but with a limited pallet of northern conifers and deciduous trees. In the first category were pines both red and white, three kinds of spruce, balsam fir, larch and hemlock. Among the hardwoods were sugar maples and red maples, ash, beech, red oak, black cherry, white, yellow and gray birch, quaking and big tooth aspen, and alas butternut and elms, which have both now succumbed to plagues. Common in the area but absent from our particular property were red cedar, cottonwood, basswood, walnut, and black locust. In the 70s of the last millennium, I planted cedars and cottonwoods;  they are now mature and replicating themselves. The walnut that I planted fifteen years ago is now 25 feet tall and very handsome. I have only one basswood, which I found as a seedling and transplanted to to a prominent place;  I've been waiting all these years for its descendants. The black locusts that I grew from seeds harvested in Colorado are now starting to make an impression on the landscape. I've also added some trees that might be able to survive our warmer winters: a hickory (growing very nicely), a swamp white oak, a bur oak (and its lone offspring) and a sycamore (which has survived two winters).  I've also experimented and failed with some trees that grow just a bit south of us: catalpa, horse chestnut, "Crimson King" maple, little-leaved linden, and ginkgo. Perhaps I'll try again now that the weatherh as warmed. One of my neighbors has successfully reared a metasequoia; it's tempting to try but I think on the whole I'd rather stay with north American trees. On the other hand, we'll need some new trees to take the place of the ash, which are soon to be decimated. 

Red Pines

This stand of magnificent trees is composed of red pines, pinus resinosa.

Each tree is between 60 and 65 feet tall and they are all exactly 51 years old. How can I be so sure about height and age? 

Height is easy to determine using  the Calloway 300 Pro Laser Range Finder. Age?  Here's the history. In 1970, some friend or acquaintance, I can't remember exactly who, acquired a hundred red pine seedlings for a forestry project. . He couldn't make use of all of them and so he gave us ten -- each one perhaps 4-6 inches long and the sum of their stems no thicker than a #2 pencil. I didn't know exactly what to do with these treasures, so i planted them in a row in the vegetable garden. Which is where they sat until 1972, when I decided to plant them on the dike of the newly constructed pond, where they remain.

In doing so i acted in defiance of the local wisdom, which is, never plant a tree on the dike. Why? Because the tree will eventually die, and the "water will follow the roots" and weaken the dam. I judged this reasoning to be faulty. In the first place, red pines, like all conifers, are shallow-rooted. The surface of the dike is fifteen feet above the level of the water in the pond, so when the pine eventually dies, its rootball is will still be above water level. Moreover, red pines are reported to live for centuries (some say four hundred years), and I just can't bring myself to worry about what's going to happen to a dike in the far distant future when, no doubt, the pond will long since have reverted to the thick swamp that it was before we dug it out.

But why red pines rather than white (pinus strobus) which is generally considered to be the much superior species? Because a), I had these red pine seedlings availablei in the garden, and b) because at that time many of the white pines in our neighborhood were suffering from a insect-borne disease that killed the leader shoot and therefore deformed the tree (leader shoot disease seems to be a thing of the past and now our young white pines are again growing up tall and straight). And red pines as consistently healthy.

For their first decade, the red pines made scarcely any impression on the landscape. Now they dominate. When I sit in their shade, I am pleased to recall their entire history, which allows me to tell them, proudly, "I knew you when you were just a sprout!"

 

 

 

Fly Swatters

For many years, we've had to make do with this inferior fly-swatter:

It's made of molded plastic and extruded metal wire. It's not handsome -- a ghastly inappropriate pink-purple color for the flapper and a small gauge white-coated wire for the handle. Is there a name fpr this  styleless style, other than dime-store cheap. Mid-century modern in its least attractive manifestation. Not only unbeautiful, it leaves much to be desired in function. The flapper is inflexible and rigid, which makes it difficult to kill the fly without splattering it. Moreover, the wire handle lacks integrity and offers an uncomfortable grip.

Now feast your eyes on this newly-acquired fly-swatter. It's a thing of beauty.

Notice the turned hardwood handle (maple, I believe, or possibly birch), perfectly suited to the human hand. The heavy gauge shaft leading to a genuine metal screen flapper. It's a fly-swatter to savor;  a classic. Many a graceful swat in it.

An anniversary or a birthday in the offing? Nothing says "I love you" more than a fly-swatter of distinction. It's also unsurpassed as a wedding present. If you're in a generous mood, "his" and "hers" fly swatters will get that marriage off to a great start.

Linen, Silk, etc.

I've been reading about the origin of spinning and weaving -- specifically E. J. W. Barber's Prehistoric Textiles (Princeton, 1991), a comprehensive and exhausting survey of everything that was known about the subject thirty years ago. I'm dazzled -- in part by the author, who turns the story into an adventure, but even more so by our brilliant neolithic ancestors. Some among our forbears, starting perhaps 30,000 years ago, looked at this plant, common flax, 

and figured out how to turn it into linen -- a complicated, many step process. How did they even begin to imagine such a transformation? Did they examine the plant and say, hey that looks like it will make a nice shirt or a pair of pants? To arrive at such a concept seems like an act of almost preternatural intelligence. After all, there was no template or model. It's not as though there were other fabrics made from other plants fibers. Flax into linen was a first. There were predecessors. Clothes, I imagine, in the form of animal skins or furs, must have been in use. I've read that reeds and other plant materials had been plaited into baskets and nets. But flax into linen was not at all obvious. We can be proud of our ancestors.

Here's a picture of the oldest recovered linen garment: the so-called Tarkhan Dress, which was found in a cemetery near Cairo in 1913 and radiocarbon-dated to between 3482 and 3102 BCE, or 5 and a half millennia ago. It's quite stylish and isn't in much worse shape than some of the favored garments in my own personal wardrobe.

Anadromous or Catadromous?

Until this last week, when I read Patrik Svensson's Book of Eels (2019), I had never encountered either of these lovely and mysterious adjectives. I'm delighted to add "anadromous" and
"catadromous," along with their cousin "diadromous" to my vocabulary, though when I'll be able to drop any of these words into my quotidian or even hebdomadal discourse is not immediately obvious, especially inasmuch as I'm not all that confident about their accentuation. Moreover, I rarely get into heart-to-hearts about icthyic migration. 

Anadromous fishes hatch and spend their first months in freshwater streams and rivers but then they migrate to the vasty deep, where they grow and mature. When they feel ready, they return to the streams in which they were spawned to deposit and fertilize their eggs. Salmons are famously anadromous (as well as romantic and celebrated), but equally so are less-heralded smelt, herring, and shad. Eels, on the other hand, are catadromous. They are hatched deep in the ocean and then drift and wander to freshwater streams and rivers. European eels may spend, according to Svensson, as many as fifteen years in the shallows until they get the urge for going. No one knows what calls to them, but they plain have to go. Then they set out for the dangerous Sargasso Sea in the mid-Atlantic. Eel reproduction has entirely evaded the eyes of human investigators.  Nor has a single eel egg ever been identified. Eels are modest, private, discreet. No one  knows if or how eels select their mates. Do they enact elaborate courtship rituals, or do the females simply lay their putative eggs amidst a cloud of eelish milt?

Eels are not kosher, but not because they are catadromous. The rules, as set out in Leviticus, are very clear: "Everything in the waters that has fins and scales, whether in the seas or in the rivers, you may eat. But anything in the seas or the rivers that has not fins and scales is detestable to you."  Why the Lord of Hosts set His face against shrimp and clams is unknowable -- but it worked, in the sense that the religion survived and, some say, prospered for lo these three thousand years. Food taboos are a common feature of religions -- they help to separate us from them. But shouldn't taboos be minimally consistent?  If the author or authors of Leviticus had said, don't eat eels, they're slimy, ugly and tasteless to boot -- well that would be a religious prohibition I could honor. But the scales thing, I don't know, because it's now clear that eels do have scales (as well as fins). Eel scales are very small. They are embedded in the skin, and they are smothered with eel slime. They are difficult to find, but they're definitely, unquestionably present. Yet the authorities continue to deride eels as treyf and have added the distinctly unBiblical gloss that the fish's scales must be visible and detachable without harming the skin. Unjust to eels, I say. I think they deserve a retrospective pass and a full rabbinical apology.  

My reasons for not eating eels are plain and sincere: eels are hideous beasts. Even Svensson, who loves eels and eel-fishing, admits that they are loathsome to any sensible palate. 

Query: my daughter was born and lived here in her home town until she was eighteen years old. Then she left for California, where she birthed and raised her two fine children. Now she's returned home to her native streams at last. So is she catadromous or anadromous?

Today Let Us Celebrate the Blanket

What an excellent invention! Imagine life without the blanket. At night, we'd still be keeping warm with hay and leaves. Yeesh, defective insulation. Hay and hayseeds in our noses and mouths. Leaves, leaflets, thick main ribs and petioles poking and imprinting our skin. Constant renewal problems: "Have remembered to fetch the hay for tonight yet?" Cleanliness problems -- small insects in the hay and leaves, however carefully processed. And then frequent trips to "Hay and Leaves" -- the chain of stores that dominates the market. "Do you know what they're asking this year for a half bale of leaves?"

When we pull that luxurious blanket over our shoulders, do we remember to thank the inventor or inventors of the cotton or woolen blanket?  Are we sufficiently appreciative of the luxury in which we live?

Coming soon: National Pillow Day.  

Tails

Most animals, mammals included, sport tails. As well they should. Tails are truly excellent appendages -- essential equipment for survival in many cases. Most primates have tails, but alas, the apes, our most immediate cousins, lack these useful "limbs." Some random mutation, way back when, and zap, no more tails. As a result, we humans live in a tragically diminished universe. And deep down, we feel the loss -- it's a fact that humans have been desperately trying to grow tails for countless millennia. Embryo after embryo puts his or her whole heart into the effort. Tails are there, prominently, between day 31 to 37 of the gestational process, but then they disappear -- leaving the poor embryo dispirited and regretful. In mourning! How much happier a species we would be if we could only wag. 

Tails have many uses. For locomotion, obviously. We'd be much better tree and monkey-bar climbers if we had good prehensile tails. We wouldn't be nearly so earthbound. There would be fewer dangerous falls if we had tails -- they're essential for balance. Just watch a cat or a squirrel. Plus a human with a tail could grab on to something to keep himself upright. A tail can also be used for defense. Grab the bad guy's arm with a good strong grasping tail. Think about how much more interesting the martial arts or wrestling would be if were were betailed. Imagine how useful a prehensile tail would be at a cocktail party; both your hands are occupied spreading the green stuff on the cracker, so you hold your wine glass with your tail. 

Tails are also good communicators; they're expressive. Observe canis domesticus: submission, aggression, defiance, excitement, puzzlement. Tails would be important for parent child interactions. "Don''t you dare swish your tail at me, young lady." If dogs can do it, why couldn't we do it better?  

And also sexual activity. Imagine the possibilities. 

Style: "how are you wearing your tail this year?" Billion dollar industries revolve around haircare. Tailcare offers even greater possibilities. I'm sure that the expense of tail grooming, tail coloring, tail enhancing, and tail bejeweling could lift us out of most recessions. Tailcare would be one of the major drivers of the economy.

Human life would have been infinitely richer.

Brown Recluse

Last night, I was lying in bed comfortably reading Michael Kulikowski's excellent new book on the last years of the Roman Empire. I was concentrating very hard, because it's difficult for me to retain the decisions made at Nicaea in 325. I can read a paragraph about the Arian or some other "heresy" and five minutes later I can't remember who was on what side, or why it matters, except that those on the wrong side were liable to be burnt alive. What part of the brain is supposed to retain this stuff?  In any case, I was lost in the book, quite content, comfortable -- supportive mattress, soft pillow and all that -- while, unbeknownst to me, a spider was making its way up the backside of the book cover. Why? Where did it come from?  All I know is that it rounded the bend, so to speak, nonchalantly strolling into view at the very top of the verso page.

Immediately the most primitive part of my brain was activated, I elevated out of the bed like some sort of 1950s cartoon character, hovered for a second or two, and then found myself on the floor, frantically flapping the sheets and blankets, searching for the offending arachnid. Get him before he gets me!

If I understand what happened, the amygdala, the part of the brain that's in charge of fear, governed my actions. The amygdala has been producing fear and flight responses long before it came to be incorporated into homo sapiens. 

After a few minutes we (I had called in auxiliaries) located the offending guy, and he's now sitting on my desk in a tightly sealed Bonne Maman jam jar.

I think it's a brown recluse. It sure looks like one. The color and shape are right out of the official catalog. According to the authorities, the only foolproof way to ascertain if it's a brown recluse is to count its eyes -- six rather than the usual spidery eight. But anyone who thinks that I'm going to get close enough to this spider to count its eyes has another think coming. Brown recluses are rare in our part of the world, but they're not unknown. My book came via interlibrary loan from Laramie, Wyoming; perhaps the spider came along for the ride.

Why be frightened of a brown recluse the size of a quarter, legs extended?  "Brown recluse bites can inflict significant or even life-threatening damage. Bites may cause severe pain, ulcers, fever, chills, nausea, joint pain, or even seizures."  Also, necrosis. Scars from necrotic flesh can last a lifetime. A friend of a friend lost a few months of his life and a hunk of gluteus maximus to a bite on the butt. 

The spider is quite active now in its new home -- the jam jar. It's a beautifully engineered little creature and very industrious, unceasing in its determination to find the way out. I admire it, behind glass, and I probably share a lot of DNA with it -- though it's hard to feel a close kinship. 

The "take-away": even though some parts of my brain have deteriorated, my amygdalae are in splendid working order.

The "Yips"

The yips have been big news this week because Jose Altuve, Houston's golden-glove second baseman has made three throwing errors in two games. Glaring, costly errors. He's bounced balls to first base and to second base -- throws of twenty or forty feet which he has made successfully thousands of times in his outstanding career.

The "yips" is sports jargon for the sudden, inexplicable inability to make an ordinary or routine play. It's commonly used by golfers when they start missing short putts --but baseball has its famous yippers -- Steve Saxe, Chuck Knoblauch (both of them second baseman who have the shortest, easiest throws)  and now, possibly Altuve. Sometimes a good pitcher will lose his control and start to miss badly; the retired pitcher at the microphone will say, "he's lost his release point," which is a yippish diagnosis without using the word. Athletes think that the problem is psychological but it's possible that the condition is merely neurological - a "focal dystonia" or muscle spasm in the wrist. Basketball yips? Yes, sometimes a good foul shooter will miss four or five in a row. 

I suspect that the yips may not be a sports-only syndrome.

Once, a decade or two ago, I was driving across the country on a four-lane and needed to brake. For some reason, my feet (I was driving a standard transmission so both feet and the clutch pedal were involved) couldn't remember which was the brake pedal. I flailed with both feet and was utterly panicked for about five long seconds. Then I came to my senses, put the correct foot on the correct pedal, and continued on in normal fashion. Life continued. But if I had crashed the car and killed myself, which was certainly a possibility, investigators would have thought that I had fallen asleep at the switch. They'd have been wrong; it was just the yips -- a failure to perform a task that should have been entirely routine.

I wonder how many road disasters are caused by undiagnosed yippishness.

Do actors get the yips? Do musicians? Dentists?  Airline pilots? Surgeons ("You know, I've done that back surgery hundreds of times but three out of the last four, I've sliced entirely through the guy's spinal cord").

My Life in Objects -- IX (Shovel)

It's called a transplant shovel, and it's manufactured by Sneeboer, a company located in Holland. If you want to buy a garden tool from Sneeboer, you get on the virtual line, and then wait until your number comes up. Worth waiting.

I have a weakness for well-made garden tools. This one might be the best I own, my favorite, although the Felco #2 hand pruner is also a work of art.

Note the construction. The V-shaped blade is one piece of solid steel. It's not screwed or bolted to the ash shaft, but rivetted, twice. The "D-handle" itself is carved out of a single solid piece of hardwood, so it can't fall apart.

I use the shovel to dig plants from crowded areas of the perennial garden to transplant or to separate. It's also ideal for poaching ferns from the forest. The shovel is the only tool that lets you easily divide a woody clump of Siberian irises (or any other clumping perennial). With a standard spade, when you try to get a little purchase, you fall to left or right or to the ground, endangering your cranky old vertebrae. It's a superbly balanced tool, a pleasure to use. It's going to be around for many more years.

We call it the "magic shovel."

What Are the Odds?

It's a commonplace that every one of us is improbable and accidental -- a fluke of all flukes. The odds against you or me or any particular person being born, of coming into life, are infinitesimal -- a positron's dimension (if positrons have dimension) shy of nothing, of zero.

Why is any birth so unlikely?  To begin, while every sperm is sacred (as we're told on good authority), every sperm is also unique. There are 200 million or more of the little whipper-snappers in the normal ounce or so of human male ejaculate -- each one a quirky unique assemblage of genes. Both your and my individual existence depends on one particular sperm lashing itself into a lather to be the first to break the tape. If the sperm with your name on it had foundered, and the dark horse sperm in the next lane had penetrated the egg, you yourself wouldn't have been conceived, wouldn't have existed. An entirely other human being would have suckled at the breast, cried in the crib, perched in the high chair. If you're a boy, your "other" might have been a girl, and vice versa.

So we are all many-millions-to-one long shots. But multiply the odds against you yourself being welcomed to the world by the even more remote odds against the conceptions of your four grandparents. Your grandmas and grandpapas exist only because in each case two people out of all the potential great-grandparent-generation cohort on earth chanced to meet and find a particular opportunity on a particular day and particular spot of time to copulate so that those remote grandsires could launch their own flotilla of swimmers upriver. How many accidents had to occur to compile the particular DNA which comprises your own identity and individuality? 

Then we must add factors such as the strife and wars and migrations and diseases that united or separated our great-grandfolks and their great-great grandfolks and yea, even unto our Olduvai forebears and to the pliopithecoids who preceded them, and then back through the early mammals and to the dark backward and abysm of time. Gosh, it makes you wonder how anything at all ever happens to happen in this random chancy aleatory world -- and yet remarkable things (such as you and I being born) continue to occur. And a good thing, too.

Even More Wisdom

 

I have the hardest time remembering the number of stars in our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Is it 300 million or 300 billion?  Either number is so far out of my ken, so far beyond my ability to grasp, that it won't stick in my head. Moreover, it doesn't seem to make much of a difference. But now I've checked once again -- and it's 300 billion stars (ballpark --  not an exact door-to-door census). That's three thousand millions of stars. Also, it's 130,000 light years from one side of the galaxy across to the center (the radius). The mass of our galaxy is 1.5 trillion solar masses. Does that figure include or exclude Dark Matter? I don't know. 

That's just the start. The full story is even more astonishing still. In addition to the Milky Way, there are approximately 34 billion galaxies such as ours in the universe. Or there used to be until a few years ago; the most recent estimate is 100 billion galaxies. From my standpoint, here on what Shakespeare naively called "the sure and firm-set Earth" -- a smallish planet revolving around the lucky old sun in one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way -- whether there are 34 billion or 100 billion galaxies out there doesn't much change the situation. In a nutshell: it's big; we're little.

Even seventy years ago, when I was a boy just starting to learn about the stars, the universe was smaller and simpler. No one told me, because no one knew, about the Big Bang, about star formation, about black holes and supermassive black holes, standard candles, quasars, exoplanets, etc. Knowledge is expanding as rapidly as the universe; it's only a few centuries ago that Galileo was sent to his room for proving that Earth wasn't a still point at the center of the world. "Eppure, si muove."

Actually, I'm glad that Copernicus and Galileo and Newton de-centered the universe. I rather prefer being insignificant. Standing at the center of the universe -- well, it was too much responsibility, too much pressure. It's mighty consoling to be trivial. It helps to put our daily woes in perspective.

Is it more staggering that the universe is so ridiculously immense or that members of our species have had the smarts to figure it out. Not only the engineering skills to devise telescopes and spacecrafts to gather the data, but the brains to think abstractly and mathematically. And the courage to do so. We're an accomplished and admirable species when we're not torturing and killing each other for no particular reason. I'm proud of us, some of the time.

When my father was the age I am now, he said to me, "As far as I can figure, I'm just a link in a long chain going from nowhere to nowhere." He was exactly on target. But we should also remember that the chain of which he spoke includes Bach and Rembrandt and Einstein. And you and me  And as long as I remain a link in that chain, I intend to make the most of my insignificant existence -- the only one I have.

"That which we are, we are."

The State of Ornithology in the Seventeenth Century

I've just read Tim Birkhead's biography of The Wonderful Mr Willoughby, The First True Ornithologist (London, 2018). Birkhead's thesis is that Francis Willoughby was not merely a bird watcher, but an innovative, diligent, and imaginative scientist, the founder of a new area of knowledge. 

Ornithology when Willoughby (1635 –1672) started to look at birds was astonishingly primitive. For example, students did not even agree that birds migrated. Perhaps, as Aristotle had suggested, they hid in holes during the winter. Perhaps they transmuted from a species that departed to a species that arrived. With no observers in southern lands and no rapid communication, it's not surprising that it was hard to imagine that birds flew south in the fall and returned in the spring. Even now, when all is revealed, migration still seems, at least to me, to be mysterious, miraculous, and wondrously improbable. 

Before the "new philosophy put all in doubt," the assumption that governed all "science" was that the natural world should be studied for evidence of divine wisdom -- a practice which blinkered understanding and limited speculation. The questions that people asked about birds were therefore not particularly challenging. They asked which ones were good to eat, which ones could be kept in cages, and which ones had medicinal value. 

The first task of new ornithology was simply to take a census. What birds live here, by what names are they called, and how should they be classified?  In the non-standardized late medieval world, most birds bore regional or demotic names, and sometimes the same name was attached two or more species of birds. It took a while before the ars-foot came to be recognized and conventionalized as the great-crested grebe and to earn the official designation Podiceps cristatus. It was the same with the such regionally-named birds as the annet, bald buzzard, the Bohemian chatterer, the copped douker, the coulterneb, the didapper, the dun-diver, the fern-owl, the flusher, the gid, the glead, the gorcock, the ox-eye, the pickmire, the puit, the puttock, the pyrag, the rock ouzel, the scarf, the skout, and the witwall?  It remained to be demonstrated that the "yarwhelp" "was in fact the East Anglian name for the bar-tailed godwit and was to be distinguished from the similar black-tailed godwit." That the sea-pie was an oystercatcher. That the elegug was a guillemot. "The sea-swallows they there (on Caldey Island) call spurs, and the razor-bills are called elegugus.... This name elelgug some attribute to the puffin, and some to the guillem[ot];  indeed they know not what they mean by this name." Nomenclature was a thicket.

Willoughby was an energetic surveyor and classifier. But as he became more familiar with bird life, he started to ask questions of genuine scientific interest. What is the function of the tomial tooth? Do all birds of the same species have the same color iris? How many birds have rictal bristles? Do birds who lay two eggs produce one male and one female? Do female birds ever have two ovaries and two oviducts? Can birds hold on to their eggs at will, or are they laid involuntarily? How do birds survive the cold of winter? Why do birds molt?

While these are not necessarily the questions of a modern ornithologist, they certainly represent a new beginning. Many thanks to Birkhead for bringing Willoughby to our attention.

How sad that the first true ornithologist died at age thirty-six. 

 

 

Missing Megafauna

Many years ago, sometime during the previous millennium, I was taken to an African game park -- elephants, rhinoceroses, giraffes, and lions (the hippos were AWOL). It was astonishing to see these huge beasts. I didn't realize at the time that it was semi-miraculous that these creatures had survived to our day, even in a de facto zoo, when so many other massive animals had recently gone extinct. When homo sapiens arrived on the scene, say 50,000 years ago, there were many animals that would have made a zoo park several orders of magnitude more remarkable that the one I visited. Why did these beasts go extinct?  Disease, habitat change, and competition are likely culprits but it's hard to deny that our predatory ancestors must take some of the blame.   

Yes, the game park had lions, but it would have been infinitely more exciting if it housed not only the African lion, but the European lion which was half again as large and which survived lately enough to be well known to the Greeks.

Other big cats were also missing: the famous saber tooth, everyone's nightmare, as well as the American false cheetah, a cheetah-like cougar weighing 190 formidable pounds. I would also have liked to see the thylacine, the so-called "marsupial lion" or sometimes "Tasmanian tiger" which survived until 1936, late enough to be photographed.

I would also have liked to see a cackle of European hyenas. Even more, the two-ton short-faced Bear, with whom our paleolithic ancestors competed, which was three times the size of a modern polar bear. The equally large ground sloth, even the bones of which are impressive.

And the sloth lemur, the size of a big male gorilla. The Irish deer, as big as a moose, with an outsized, out-of-proportion rack. Then there were the elephant-like animals: the Columbian mammoth of the American southwest, smaller than its modern African cousin, but with astonishingly curved tusks. The wooly mammoth, surviving until just 3700 years ago on Wrangel Island off the Siberian coast. The straight-tusked elephant, two or three times the size of modern African elephant. The North American mammoths. And also Cuvier's gompothere, which looks like an elephant but isn't one, but which was seven feet tall at the shoulder and which lasted until about 14,000 years ago:

And along with them, the morningstar-tailed glyptodon, a five thousand pound armadillo: 

I would have loved to cast my eye on the diprotodont, the largest known marsupial, which weighed in at three tons and lived until 45,000 years ago

The wooly rhinoceros, as large as a diprotodont. The sivathere, an odd-looking  giraffid. The tree kangaroo. The short-faced kangaroo, three times the size of any living kangaroo.

And right there in Vermont, rustling and stomping in the forest, were the stag moose and Jefferson's ground sloth and the long-nosed peccary and Harlan's musk ox and the Vero tapir and the giant beaver, all recently gone. (You wouldn't have wanted to come face-to-face with a giant beaver. Or swim in its pond, if it made ponds. You'd be better off listening to it slapping its tail in a game  park.)

 And then there were some true avian oddities worth taking a gander at: the flightless moas of New Zealand, the female at 440 pounds, two-and-half times the size of the male. The cursorial owl, a three-foot tall flightless owl, which pursued its prey afoot. Haast's eagle, with a wingspread of seven and a half feet. The five hundred pound Elephant Bird, which survived in Madagascar until a thousand years ago. 

And then the tarpan, the warrah, the toxodon. Strangest of all, macrauchenia, a three-toed ungulate not closely related to anything alive today, which looked something like a humpless camel with a droopy snout and which was around until about 10,000 years ago. 

It would have been quite a show if these animals had survived. Well worth the price of admission. 

A Choice Euphemism

Victorian novelists had a hard time describing bodies, especially female bodies. Their usual practice was to sidestep such subjects entirely though the more daring of them might resort to suggestion or innuendo.

Here's an instance in which Thomas Hardy ties himself into comical  knots trying to tell his audience that although Tess Derbyfield (in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 1891) is very young and almost childish she has already developed a large bosom: "She had an attribute which amounted to a disadvantage just now; and it was this that caused Alec d'Urberville's eyes to rivet themselves upon her. It was a luxuriance of aspect, a fullness of growth, which made her appear more of a woman than she really was. She had inherited the feature from her mother without the quality it denoted. It had troubled her mind occasionally, till her companions had said that it was a fault which time would cure."  So very elliptical. It's distressing that frank-minded Thomas Hardy had to resort to such circumlocutions.

A later novelist might simply have noted that she was physically mature and that her emotions would eventually catch up but for now she was vulnerable.

Back in Brooklyn we might have said, "Though she's only a kid, he has a pair of gazongas on her like you wouldn't believe and they're going to get her into a whole lot of trouble"

Year of the Rooster

The rooster came to our attention about a month ago. We heard him before we saw him. He was living at the edge of the forest, about one hundred yards from the house. After a few days he became bolder and we were able to catch a glimpse now and then. He's a Barred Rock, fully mature, with a bright red comb and superior wattles, but with woeful tail feathers. We don't know from where he came. We asked around but none of the neighbors is missing a rooster. We guessed: he's an escapee, or, perhaps his owner became tired of him and kicked him out of the truck, or (my favorite theory) he was in a rooster fight, lost his tail feathers and retired to the woods in shame. But in fact, we have no idea how he came to settle on our property.

Little by little he started to become more comfortable with us. He would spend his day in the flower garden, furtively eating insects. He was especially fond of earwigs. A good occupation, I thought. No harm except to the bugs. Eventually he came to tolerate our presence. He would sit a few yards away, studying me while I weeded. He gained our respect, because he managed to survive even though the forest is filled with foxes and fisher cats and weasels and coyotes and the air is patrolled by hawks. He liked to visit the donkeys and peck around their manure piles.  When he started to roost not in the forest but in the blueberry bushes close to the house I became concerned -- this may be more of a rooster guest than I need. And then he took up the habit of cock-a-doodle-do-ing at dawn just outside our bedroom window. And during afternoon nap time. And familiarizing himself with the vegetable garden, where he snacks on cucumbers. (He loves cucumbers.) He became ever more bold -- a few days ago he was just outside the kitchen, pecking on the glass door, hoping, I imagine, to be let inside. And when I didn't let him in, he left a large retaliatory splash of rooster dropping right at the doorway.

We looked out of the small north window of our bedroom and there he was perched on the railing, peering in. A peeping-Tom rooster. (Did he catch an eyeful!!) 

One day a near neighbor telephoned: "Your rooster is here."  "He's not my rooster."  

And then he disappeared. For the first time in a month, there was no crowing at dawn.  OK, we thought, some predator got him. One of these days, we'll stumble upon a bunch of black and white feathers in the forest.

But then a friend who lives on Ira's Pinnacle told us that he had seen a pair of chickens on Hackett Hill Road about a half a mile up the road. He couldn't be sure, but he figured it must be "your" rooster and a hen. 

So that's where he's been!! He's a gallinaceous gallant gallivanting with the local ladies. I thought, good for him; I don't have to concern myself with him any longer. He'll go feral and start a family. He must not know about Vermont winters.

But not so. This morning he was back, solitary, crowing vigorously outside my window. His romance, if it were a romance, didn't work out. I can't imagine why because he's become quite a handsome bird. He personable, friendly and he's grown an an impressive new set of tail feathers. He's plump and shiny; his walk, once furtive, has become a decisive strut. There he is now, cock-a-doodling his head off in the patch of cucumbers.

Side Effects

LENFERA is generally safe to use, but possible side effects include stuffy or runny nose, headaches, goosebumps, hiccups, cramps, sensitivity to bright lights or glare, shingles, gingivitis, numbness of lips or upper palate, dry scalp, ringing in the ears (tinnitus), acid reflux, dizziness, hair loss, hearing loss, kidney stones, constipation and/or diarrhea, sudden loss or gain of weight, inability to swallow, drooling, dessication, macular degeneration, bunions, uncontrollable twitching or muscle spasms, rectal itch, toenail fungus, nausea, abdominal pain, difficulty with breathing, edema, fistula, halitosis, absence of libido, tachycardia, swelling in knees or other joints, scabiosa, bots, flatulence, loss of insight, roseola, Osceola, bloat, priapism, Purim, bowel obstructions, failure to thrive, scoliosis, creeping phlox, aggression, acne, increased facial or body hair, world-weariness, dyspepsia, rash, fatigue, agoraphobia, lycanthropy, high fevers, tremors, blurred vision or sudden blindness, frostbite, ringworm, procrastination, irritability, hot flashes, mange, barnacles, pellagra, night sweats, bladderwort, paranoia, clumsiness, thrush, zeugma, migraine, feelings of humiliation, heart arrest, tuatara, memory loss, white nose, rapture, paralysis, stage fright, bioluminescence, scurvy, hallucinations, chancre, catarrh, pink eye, red eye, rabies, insomnia, nightmares, spontaneous combustion, Coggins, blurring of gender identity, wasting disease, aphasia, blackouts, suicidal ideation, nosebleeds, woe, catatonia, gangrene, acute pain, multiple organ failure, death.

If symptoms persist, consult your physician.

LENFERA has been approved by the FDA.

Geological Words New to Me

Unlike most sciences, where there are numerous pseudo-Greek or pseudo-Latin coinages, geology offers all sorts picturesque and lovely words that have been in the language for years  -- and are novel to me. So "graywacke" --a muddy sandstone containing particles of quartz"; "fumarole" -- a small vent emitting jets of steam; "sinter"  -- a crust of calcium carbonate; "molfette" -- a vent emitting gases such as carbon dioxide; "coquina" -- a cemented mass of debris of shells; "clint" -- a sharp ridge; "grike" -- a fissure or crack opened by dissolving limestone; "knickpoint" -- a sharp step, up or down, in a river; "gour" -- a calcite ridge formed when water rich in carbonate flows over an irregular surface; "drumlin" -- an isolated mountain; "nunatak" -- a projecting peak in land otherwise covered by ice;  "firn"-- a mass of ice pellets compacted by the weight of snow above;  "cwm" -- a steep rock basin;  "col" -- a narrow pass; "esker" -- a winding ridge formed by retreating glaciers; "pingo" -- a cone, dome  or hump caused when freezing water expands beneath the permafrost and pushes up the earth; "yardang" -- parallel ridges of hard rock.

I'm not convinced that I could recognize any of these phenomena of my own accord. I'd probably need a professional geologist or guide. But the words themselves sure are magnificent.  And this is just a small sample of the wordhoard. 

Notes on "Mucilage."

“Mucilage” is a word whose sound is wildly inappropriate to its meaning. In the world of adhesive nomenclature, “paste” is good and “glue” is even better. Trisyllabic mucilage ought to denote something far more serious -- perhaps a problem involving waste disposal ("OK, we've rescued the elephants, but what are we going to do with all that mucilage.")

In my life, mucilage made its mark long before glue arrived on the scene. In Brooklyn (and perhaps elsewhere) 1940s schoolchildren were issued small curvy bottles of the yellow stuff, each fitted with a red-rubber tip which was slit so that a drop or two of mucilage could be emitted when the bottle was pressed to the surface of your construction-paper or doily project. Actually, the slit regularly became caked and occluded and the hardened mucilage had to be scraped off with your fingernails. It was a lot like nose-picking.  

LePage’s Mucilage, I believe it was called. We said Page as "page" but surely LePage's Mucilage if pronounced Frenchly (le pahje) would be far more euphonious. Some claim that if you were building a model airplane, you would use mucilage on your fuselage, but I believe such an assertion to be the kind of persiflage at which I take umbrage. 

And yes, the word is a descendant and cousin of Latin mucus, meaning mucus.

Unbeknownst to 1940s me, mucilage has a life outside the bottle. It is a glycoprotein and exopolysaccharide found in most plants where it helps to store water and thicken membranes. I have now learned that the sticky stuff on the leaf tips of the insect-catching sundews that live at the edge of our pond is a form of mucilage. 

I would be curious to know from what plants William Nelson LePage distilled the vast vats of mucilage that were diluted and parceled out to schoolchildren, who then spent the hour after "Arts and Crafts" removing nasty mucilage scale from their fingers. But I do now know why schools loved the stuff  -- because vegetable mucilage is, if not exactly edible, not poisonous either. No hoofs were harmed during its production.

Once having established the mucilage monopoly, Mr. LePage must have brought home zillions. And if his descendants were as sticky-fingered as I suspect they must have been, they will be enjoying the profits on their yachts or in their Manhattan penthouses to this day while we 1940s pupils are left with only memory-traces of mucilage's peculiar feel and odor.  

Other words of my life:

slouch,

cishet,

yips

ramps

jot and tittle

worship

hack

 

A "Word Problem"

If one 4 1/2 year old grandson can launch five foot stream of urine from where he stands to the base of a tree, how many 80-year-old grandfathers would it take to equal the performance?

Some answers:  a) 20 (tag team line of grampas each contributing 4").  b) does it count if I hurl my Depends?  c) I know the answer but I forgot. 

Sexual Dimorphism -- What's the point?

By all rights I should have been attending to the intricate areas of my face while shaving, but I lapsed into a reverie. My obsession of the moment--the beard. Why? Why in the world do human males grow hair on their faces? What's the point? The beard is completely valueless except to Gillette and Schick and now Harry. 

If the beard had a genuine function and if it honestly kept a person warm in winter, then for what reason would evolution deprive the gals of equivalent protection?  

Do bearded males garner a larger share of the nubile maidens than the shaved and beardless? Or a disproportionate share of the wealth? I know of no evidence that they do so. The fact that most men shave their beards argues that beards lack power or function. 

It's sexual dimorphism without purpose or logic. My guess--and it's only a guess--is that the beard-gene clung to a gene with a useful male purpose a couple of hundred thousand years ago and never let go. Accidental hirsuteness.

I suppose that there are times when sexual dimorphism can be useful. Those magnificent manes sported by the lions of the Serengeti certainly make a formidable statement--noli me tangere and by the way remember to keep your paws off the the ladies in my harem. I can see that--but then, the males of the enormous extinct European lion managed without a ruff, as do Bengal tigers. 

The gorgeous display of the male peacock is exuberant but inessential--more subtle birds manage to signal their gender and their availability without such a prodigious waste of resources. 

I should be relieved that it's only the beard that I have to worry about. Imagine if by some quirk of evolution, males of my species grew a big rack of antlers. Way more inconvenient than a mere beard. What a bother!! I can easily imagine myself lodged in a narrow doorway, or lying in bed trying to find a comfortable position while the antlers scratch the headboard, put holes in the pillow, or poke the eye of the beloved. 

Perhaps an advanced civilization would demand that we disbud the antlers at birth? Or we might go the other route and celebrate a magnificent set. We might have evolved into a society that decorated or colored or polished the antlers. "How are you wearing your antlers this winter?" "Natural brown, I think, this year, but with golden highlights." Chains of "Mr. Antler" or "Antler King" shops ("discount on sharpening this week only"). And for guys declined into the vale of years--prosthetic antlers. 

Better a beard than antlers. Definitely.

Deepfried Oreos

On the main street of Estes Park (Gateway to Rocky Mountain National Park), a sign outside the restaurant advertised "deepfried oreos." I was both flabbergasted and thunderstruck, not believing my eyes. But here's the evidence:

Just above ice cream and below "funnel cakes" (but that's another story). Is it a hoax, or can there be such a thing? Absolutely, there's many a google-entry on "deepfried oreos." Several different recipes, one more hideous than the next. A piece of cuisine americaine that had somehow escaped me all these many years. 

One of my waggish friends writes: "I should confess that the last time my wife and I were in Paris, we sampled the deep fried Oreos at a little café on the rue de Rivoli. The sommelier suggested a hearty Cabernet to take the edge off the sweetness of the dish and the wine worked beautifully with the cookie filling, an amalgam of flavors that made our senses tingle." I of course was skeptical of his story. No knowledgeable sommelier would recommend a red wine because it was well known that deepfried oreos were best served with champagne or gatorade.

Is it possible that deepfried oreos could become part of the cuisine of old Europe? Will it be the case that in every Italian village, just between the macelleria and the quaint pasticceria there will be an oreofritteria? A mom-and-pop oreofritteria using recipes that have been in the family for centuries -- but in danger of being taken over by the big American chain, a subsidiary of -- who knows what -- called Signor Oreofritto. A terrifying prospect all around.