A Sylvan Dream

Cave Man

2011-06-20T09:11:00.005-06:00

Cave Man, a photo by SylvanDream on Flickr.

Look how far we've come. Luckily I was saved by the grips of the wild savagery of the West.

Sun Rise Above

2011-06-16T07:21:00.006-06:00

Lake Crescent and Mt. Storm King, a photo by SylvanDream on Flickr.

It was priceless and cliche all at once. The most beautiful sunrise of my life awaited me around the corner one morning as I came into a clearing on Hwy 101 passing through Olympic National Park along Lake Crescent with Mt. Storm King in the distance. Now, I have been witness to a myriad of breathtaking sunrises, but this one was just beyond majestic.

While working at Olympic Park Institute, I had began to loosely time my commute to work with the sunrise in the early summer. Some days I rode my mountain bike down a gravel road to the bus stop, while other mornings I rode it the other direction four miles along the lakeshore to a canoe that would take me, or some days several of us along with our bikes, across the lake to work. Some days we would canoe the whole distance from our house to work, never quite sure whether a placid fog or three-foot rollers would meet us along the way. And of course, we would drive some days as well. This morning I drove.

Above the shadow of a coniferous canopy, twilight was breaking into a peachy indigo as dust swirled behind my car. It looked to be a little early, so I drove on a little unexpectantly.

As I pulled over along the lakeshore and pulled out my camera I couldn’t help but smile, stand, stare, and scream a little. I might have cried, or at least now in the fiction of my memory there were tears involved. What else can you ask for in life when the day entrusts to you such an intimate and virtually transcendent view of reality?

When I wonder about the existence of heaven, I like to imagine myself high in the mountains amidst a field of wildflowers, beneath an endless sunrise whispering the promise of a new beginning. But then again, here it is, right before me.

2011-06-14T04:56:00.003-06:00

6/14/11

It has taken me quite some time to finally find the time, energy, and inspiration to get back to what I love more than most things. This year has brought me perhaps the most upheaval I have experienced, at least since days of adolescence. I have a child, a beautiful daughter now, a wonderfully loving and amazing wife, a job that promises the potential flourishing of many dreams, and I am in a place that will continually push me to seek out this path I began on who knows when.

Several times I left the Olympic Peninsula of Washington with trepidation, wondering if I could handle life away from there. On the Peninsula I feel at home, which, for me, is a place where no explanation of my beliefs or actions are necessary. It is a place where I feel understood, accepted, and encouraged to follow whatever path I perceive before me. I thought perhaps I could take this mentality and way of life with me elsewhere in hopes that I could spread this feeling to people in other areas of our country. This proved to be rather challenging. I found each time I left, something was missing immediately. Realizing this, I began to reflect on how the environment in which we live influences who we become, how we treat each other and ourselves, etc. I found that the environment in Washington tempered many people who live there in a way that seemed to fit me best. Lush, really lush vegetation shrouded by gray clouds, the peppering of storms and rain with fleeting moments of sunshine - it is in my heart and soul, part of my daily thoughts, yet I struggled to take that love anywhere else.

Now, I live in New Jersey, and I teach science in a high school only 20 miles from the Big Apple, and I am finally finding a time and place in which I am able to retain the life I relish in Washington. The hope is that I will be able to share some of that life, that Sylvan Dream, with those around me here. There are perspectives of life I don't believe we get until we look outward and deeply inwards. When I see some first glimmers of smiles of knowing wonder in the people around me, I feel some of the lush rain from the West falling inside me.

In this new place and time, I am finding I am learning and growing together as a part of something larger and very special as a father and a husband. Look where dreams take us...

One More Holiday in York, Pa

2010-01-21T13:38:00.003-07:00

Mexico is already a dream the Christmas season has fuzzied up. I was very excited to return to my family, friends, and the land, so when I saw my best friend waiting patiently in a chair for me in the airport, I felt content to be back. I came home with a debilitating cut on my foot that laid me up for several weeks, making me a little more sedentary, which isn’t much a problem in itself, but now, with two days left, I feel I am just once again settling into myself – walking in the fields and forest with dog and friends.
Listening mainly to her nose and occasionally my voice, our pointer, Sierra, runs through the fields with a directed abandon that brings me liberating delight. She circles back around to me from time to time, breathing heavier than I can imagine doing myself. She’s a huge pointer. As she runs past, a rooster tail of mud sprays behind her, her feet pounding the ground like a horse.
For a few minutes as the sun rises on Little Conewago Valley, everything is cast in a warm glow. The glistening cornstalks throw long shadows across the crunchy soil, and ice crystals form on the hairs just below my nose.
Watching Sierra run out ahead of me, my eyes follow the land to the north towards the hills where our burnt house waits to be demolished. I know I am home here, but don't always feel it with the people. My wanderings and lifestyle have brought me to appreciate a calm and welcoming demeanor. However back in Pa, I often pass awkward and cold conversations with most people. I try to remain warm and welcoming, but jeez is it ever tough to do so with someone so gruff and short as a clerk in a super market or a nine-fingered man cutting trees off his land in the woods I grew up hunting on.

Last week my sister and I took a walk in the woods. I don’t know the last time we walked through these woods together, but it is highly likely that neither of us were yet into our teens. We walked up the deeply rutted jeep trail that served as a perfect luge track for us in the snowy winters of the 90’s, and passed the rusty refuse fridge – a well-known landmark on these trails that has been there my whole life. We spliced together a walk of several miles between jeep and deer trail, circling the land we know, sharing stories of the places we passed.
Approaching our favorite hunting spot, we diverged to the trees we spent so much time in. The triple tree, a spray of three oak trees where Tiff and my dad used to hunt across from me, was now a triple stump with sprays of new growth coming up around it. The double tree where I hunted the most was now a single tree, its sibling just a stump as well. Standing directly beneath the tree I could see the black hook sticking out from the main trunk about 25 feet up where I used to hang my bow in waiting. Tiff and I pointed out some of the spots Dad used to position scent canisters around the deer trail that passed between our trees, and then waded through the next generation of head high saplings towards the jeep trail. Much of this land was beginning to enter a rather mature status as a mixed hardwood and hemlock forest. However, these woods are also quite valuable. Each year I come home, I find freshly cut stumps in some section of forest. The briars thicken for a few years as the saplings race skywards and then take over just in time for another round of their larger contemporaries to disappear to the needs of humanity.
Watching the forests change like this has made me quite sad in the past, but I am beginning to feel rather numb to the whole process. However, this scares me more. Nonetheless, there is much to enjoy.

Standing beneath a small hemlock I once sat under for a whole day during college, I told my sister how I feel there are these pockets of time and place in these hills that make everything hum in an almost silent unison. It is then I feel the quiet I seek. I would love to have a minimal shelter here in this one spot, so I could watch these woods change more closely.
Even better yet, I like to envision a small environmental education center here where the local school students come and learn about the forests, their history, and their heritage. I like to tell myself, if I had a place like this here in Pa, maybe then I could return with ease.
For now, it is back to the magic of the Pacific Northwest, the Olympic Mountains, Lake Crescent, and LeSage for another year in paradise. I can’t say how excited I am to return to what is for now, undeniably my home.

Mexico

2009-12-04T17:30:00.005-07:00

Well, I intended to write a whole lot more on my blog during this trip, but the days have been so distracted by so much else, I haven't even written much. This has been an awesome trip. I still have about 10 days to go. Here is a glimpse at the two most memorable moments of the trip thus far.

From the beach:
I have always loved coconuts, and when I was in Australia I climbed the trees every chance I had to get some fresh ones. Feeling satiated by some fresh coconut milk immediately after arriving to Playa de los Muertos, I set up my hammock and settled in. In the shade of some whispering coconut trees, I had one of those moments that you know will stick with you.
Pelicans were sunning themselves atop the rocks overlooking the waves reeking havoc on the otherwise quiet beach, fragile frigate birds cruised high above the trees on thermals, occasionally bombing into the surf for small fish. Drifting in and out of sleep, at one point I remember looking around at the few other lucky people who had found this small beach and just thinking, "Wow, I have three more weeks to do nothing but this if that is what I want. Dis is a good life."

In the City:
On the subway one afternoon in Mexico City on my way back to Lindsey and Carolyn's apartment in Tlalpan, I was impressed by the diversity of ways people cruised the subway cars scraping out a living, or maybe not. People with speakers in their backpacks played homemade mixes of anything from salsa to Christmas carols, classic rock to classic orchestral. Other people walked around selling small bags of candy or packets of gum. The going price for most items was rarely more than 5 pesos, that's less than 50 cents. Some played beautiful songs on a guitar then walked around asking for spare change. Others took it to the nth degree, circumventing a 'fair' exchange or even guilt, and moving straight to shocking pity with self mutilation.
As one guitarist made his way onto the next car, I watched a boy and a girl about my age walking towards and past me as I clung to the railing over my head. The black wife-beater the girl was wearing said 'Puerto Vallarta Pirates' in faded white letters. The boy wore a white wife-beater and held a flannel shirt with some contents in it like a sack. I noticed huge, fresh scars on his shoulder, some with dry beads of blood still on them. The girl started spouting out a well-rehearsed pitch, and the boy dropped his sack to the ground with a clinking sound. I looked over, and there were some coins in the sack, mostly mixed with a pile of glass shards. I then realized where the scars had come from. As the girl told a story I mostly didn't understand in Spanish, I did manage to understand something to the effect of, "We have nothing else to do, all we have left is our body, and we are willing to cut it if you will help us." The boy sat on the subway floor and slammed his shoulder into the pile twice. It seemed a solemn shutter pulsed through the onlookers. As the car came to a halt, they picked up the sack of shards and coins, and walked around with their hands out. A lady my parents age dropped a 10 peso coin in the sack. That's about 80 cents.

2009-10-12T14:35:00.002-06:00

So, sorry folks. I haven't been as diligent or inspired lately to write as much. I have been working a lot more on spending time with the people in my house, and I have been trying to work on some art skills as well, oh which I have few.

So, here are two photos that I thought were rather awesome the other day. I was hiking with a group of Seattle kids, and this buck walked up to us, and I saw I could frame Olympus in the background. The quality isn't the best, but it is pretty cool!

Scarcely a Moment at All

2009-08-02T17:10:00.001-06:00

7/22/09

A momentous occasion last night – the northern lights. A group of us sat around a small fire on the lakeshore, picking out constellations, satellites, and shooting stars. As the sun passed barely beneath the horizon to the north, green bands stretched out tendrils reaching skyward. They were subtle in presence and motion, undulating faintly, and flowing like a creek across a beach. As one tendril would diminish into the horizon, another would rise at its side. After less than ten minutes they subsided, leaving just the faint luminescence of the lurking sun, teasing the night of its ensuing return.
And now this morning, things are distinctly calm, or perhaps it is just my mind that has subsided into the current of the life around me. I sit in the middle of the field here at work, nearly surrounded by forest, the lakeshore glassy-calm in front of me. A doe picks her way through the salal along the edge of the field. The voice of a brown creeper falls from the heights of a doug-fir like a lazy clump of moss. Various crossbills pipe away atop the conifers, and I strain to decipher their distinct calls. There are possibly four subspecies of this bird here, each with slightly distinct vocalizations, and each with a slightly different crossed bill, which is specialized to prying open the differently sized cones of the various native conifers.
As I stare into the treetops, picking out, identifying, and observing birds, at moments it becomes silent enough that the faint tapping of the tiny white flower petals dropping from the wilting bush fifteen feet away is all I hear. Like most things so delicate, the silence is ephemeral, and seconds later it gives way to the restless crossbills. Only hours after watching the northern lights dance below Polaris, the silent sunrise explodes across the mountainside, welcomed by an awaiting chorus of birds. I can feel time dissolve into a stream of unimportance. I watch the sunrise drift down towards the lake. My eyes wander to the swallows as they swirl around. Orange ripples dance across the lake, and soon a soft breeze accentuates the crisp turns in the swallows’ flight.
Once the sun peaks above the mountains on this side of the lake and washes the field in daylight, the birds quiet down and focus on foraging. Once again time slowly precipitates upon the day as people emerge from their cabins full of sleep and wander to the dining hall for coffee.
Regardless of their duration, experiences such as these remind me that so much endlessly awaits us. I believe I can find no better way to find the power latent in each day than to seek these moments, for once they have passed, it seems only then we realize they can scarcely be described as a moment at all.

The Olympic Park Institute Mission

2009-07-24T14:33:00.000-06:00

I recently produced a video for my work's website, Olympic Park Institute. Enjoy

Summer Alpine Excursions

2009-07-19T21:57:00.004-06:00

A friend and I headed out for a short overnight in the area of Obstruction Point to go on a ridge run out along the division between Lilly and Grand Valley. We camped up high, watched the sunset, and slept under the stars. While we were packing up after a bland breakfast, we spotted two nice size black bears skirting the ridgeline where we had come from. Once we were all packed up we headed off in their direction. One took off down the mountainside, while the other waited until we were much closer to take off the other direction across the meadows.

Mid summer. Sheesh, where is the time going?

Hiking out the valley we stopped to watch trout in the alpine lakes while picking out the songs of many birds around us. Our conversations were punctuated by moments spent in silence listening to the ethereal water-like song of the hermit thrush. To me, there is no sound that compares to the song of a thrush in the mountain meadows amidst the wildflowers of the summer.

Life Everywhere on Lake Crescent

2009-07-09T09:33:00.006-06:00

Well, it is already the middle of July. We have days where I can lay out in the sun at our house and bake on our deck at near 90 degrees, and then days that feel like March, just a little warmer.

This morning I went through my usual routine. I woke up in the twilight to the soft keeer of an endangered Marbeled Murrelet filtering down through the blanket of clouds hovering halfway above up the mountains. The reflection across the lake was so still I could make out individual trees in the calm.

After a breakfast of barley, quinoa, oatmeal, goat yogurt, honey, apples, currants, and mate, I stretched out with some yoga, and hopped on my bike to head down the road. I pedaled slowly down the gravel road, across a steel bridge, and then up into the forest, along the Spruce Railroad Trail. This is an old railroad that was built during WWI to transport spruce from the coast so it could be used in the planes that were in high demand in Europe at the time. The war ended before the railroad was finished, and now the tracks have been removed and a small overgrown bike trail exists in it place. Along the five miles I bike on my way to work, I pass through forests of doug-fir three and four feet wide. From time to time the trail descends to the emerald lake shore. The water quickly drops off into sapphire depths.

Once I get to the canoe that is hidden under some trees directly across the lake from OPI, I usually just stop and lock my bike, but this morning as I was slowing down, a bird of prey dropped out of the trees and glided directly in front of me for awhile, before curling up into the trees above. It was a Barred Owl fledgling! It landed maybe thirty feet from me up in the trees, and let out a little wispy squeal like I have never heard. Another one answered it from further in the forest. I watched them fly around for awhile, eyeing me up from time to time with bobbing heads, and finally after they made their way upslope and out of sight, I hopped into the canoe and headed across the lake.

On my way across the lake I watched barn swallows swirl around above the water. A kingfisher made a lazy arc up in the air, and landed up higher in a tree along the lake shore, while a deer reached up high with hits neck outstretched to graze some doug-fir buds. What can I really complain about?

2009-06-26T08:18:00.003-06:00

Last night I moved into the downstairs master bedroom of my house since it became available in the last two weeks. This is a large room, with 4 bay windows facing the lake. The walls are white and pocked all over with thumb tack holes. I decided to move down into this room in an attempt to give myself more time alone, more out of necessity to write than anything else. LeSage is a very social house, and this is one good way I can find some space to focus my thoughts and energies a little more comprehensively.

I spent last night hanging my posters and maps - A Geologic Tapestry of North America, a World Map, and a Wonderful Map of Washington. A large print by Caspar David Friedrich, one of my favorite realists. Two Monet paintings, and then a ton of 8x10's of my favorite photos from Pa, Co, Wa, NM, and Nicaragua. My walls are now covered with colorful memories of inspiration.

I woke up this morning to the beep of my cell phone battery dying. I left it on accidentally over night, and we don't get signal here. I stood up on my bed to look out across the lake, and as I scanned the colors rippling softly in a calm breeze, my eyes fell upon a Bald Eagle by the water's edge. Perched upon a piling, it was finishing the last bits of a small fish it caught. Things were calm and beautiful. This room might be nearly perfect for me.

Pictures to follow.

2009-05-28T19:10:00.002-06:00

I have been on several hikes over the last two or so weeks, and several notable things have happened. I hope to write more about it some time soon, but until I find the time, here are some photos from a recent attempt to summit Mt. Olympus. We stopped short due to avalanche danger, but it was a pretty wonderful trip.

From the Living Room of Lesage - 5/12/09

2009-05-15T09:42:00.002-06:00

At first I thought I saw a Stellar’s Jay bobbing through the wind high above the lake, but then as it curled its wings into it chest and spiraled into a sharp dive I called out, “Eagle diving outside.” I pointed to it through the sliding glass windows as the friends I live with quickly came over to the window. Higher than I had ever seen a bald eagle soaring above the lake, this eagle had spotted a small trout near the surface of the water more than five hundred feet below. Spiraling several times and leveling out to control its speed, we watched at it dove past a backdrop of steep mountains. The dive was long enough for me to get my binoculars on it and watch its feet plunge into the lake. I saw no fish thrashing in its talons as it turned and labored towards the shore, but its bright yellow feet hung below it the hole way across the lake.

I watched the eagle slowly cross to the edge of the lake and turn west. It was climbing harder than usual, making me think it was headed to somewhere specific farther above the lake, perhaps a nest. Perhaps it did have more success than I could see from a mile across the lake. After making several switchbacks above the forest canopy, the eagle abruptly turned into the forest and swooped up to a dark mass hanging on the side of a huge cedar several hundred feet above the lake. We have a nesting pair of eagle just across the lake from where I am living!

We knew they nested on the lake here, but no one I have worked with has known the whereabouts of a nest. I waited fifteen years to see my first bald eagle staring down at me from its perch atop an old hemlock in the Little Pine Creek drainage near Lock Haven, Pa, and now through my binoculars I can see one or two heads bobbing above the massive brown nest far above the shimmering surface of Lake Crescent. Below the nest, logging trucks heavy with our timber boom down the road as it snakes along the lakeshore. Impatient locals scoot past the #14 Transit Commuter between Forks and P.A. Sometimes we can see tourists parked along the road snapping pictures of the Lake Crescent Valley. I feel very fortunate to live in such a place, but I also feel it should be a fortune more people can experience.

Park laws have grandfathered these houses into existence inside the boundaries of the National Park. However, in a long-term plan, the Park Service slowly acquires houses from families looking to sell. Many of these houses get torn down, and native saplings are planted after the land has been wiped clean of domestic remnants. We are lucky to live in one of these amazing houses that have been retained by the Park Service. Named after a previous owner who married into the Belford family, we call this amazing octagonal house Lesage, and more recently some of us have taken to calling it the Rocktagon.

Some Friday nights we educators stand around a fire aside the lakeshore and share stories from the week over some drinks. On good nights, some of us leave our clothes behind for the freedom of the icy lake water. I recently made a three-man slingshot to rekindle a love for projectiles I can’t deny. However, this time a little more maturity and a lake full of water and rocks make this endeavor much more innocent than my juvenile years.

I have a room upstairs in the back of the house, but I fall asleep most nights in my sleeping bag, staring out the sliding glass door leading out to our deck. When the weather isn’t completely terrible, I try to sleep outside as much as possible. Each month I await the waxing moon. Sometimes I sit up for hours waiting for it to rise above the mountains across the lake. I trace the constellations I know and try to gage the time as the big dipper rotates around the North Star until finally white light begins to dance through the trees. A white streak dances across the calmly rippling water, and it soon is bright enough to walk around Lesage by moonlight alone. On these nights, four deer often bed down in the grassy lawn by the lakeshore, and ducks can be seen nearby. In my opinion, there is no finer time or place to be when I am staring up at a full moon from this house, on this lake, within these majestic mountains.

Amanecer en mi Alma

2009-05-13T07:08:00.005-06:00

Sometimes at the end of a day, when things have been getting at me and I have been thinking too much, I envision myself in a nice and quiet darkened room. Glancing around, tendrils of light illuminate the corners, but when I feel like this, everything just reflects distraction. A guitar shines a glossy stare in silence. A map pinned to a wall insights an anxious itch at the back of my arm and shoulder blades. A corner of a closet with no door, climbing shoes beneath a vinyl dry bag I continually forget to return to work. Smartwool socks right side out if they are clean, inside out of they are questionable, and in the corner behind my door if they should not be worn. A mess of books cascade like dominoes over the floor against an unused bed. Titles like, Journey to Ixtlan, Angle of Repose, Ecological Literacy, Assembling the Tree of Life make a good summation of my interests, but from what distracts me these words cannot amuse.

Rain whispers through the roof. Even though it is late May, it is raining like March. Marbles of exploding rain scatter across the deck. Deep blue twilight makes my eyelids heavy as I trace the reflection of the mountains across the lake. Seurat could pock a canvas no finer. As calming as this all is, birds and bees are bouncing around inside me. The eye of spring has opened with the awakening trillium along the trail. The fuscia salmonberry blossoms have the hummingbird flashing through tendrils of misty sun in the early morning. The wren has been singing her demanding song tirelessly in the depths of the forest for too long, and now with the tanager taking his post in the tops of the doug-firs, it is time for this rain to end.

Visiting the east coast this spring during my birthday was quite a pleasant tease. Not only do I look around getting glimpses of the tardy season, but also now subtle banalities remind me of the pleasant awakening I found there. Tired of hugging my knees to my chest as I stare out the window, the expanse of this continent has become more evident, and again I am tempted to migrate towards this wonderful feeling.

It has been a great winter, and a lazy but heartening spring. Despite the distance, I feel her within me, solid as a mountain reclining across the landscape. Those curves my body has explored, my fingertips now impatiently retrace. With the clearing of the skies I feel freshness only a new day can bring. The reflection across the lake shimmers as clear as the dark pools of her eyes.

Freshness

2009-04-19T19:56:00.003-06:00

In spirit of the season, I decided to make sure I am putting forth an effort to mantain some level of freshness in my life, and my understanding of Spanish is now a part of this. I felt comfortable speaking spanish when I left Peru, but recently I have gotten a glimpse into expressing emotions in spanish, and I see there is a world of learning I have ahead of me. While in my personal life I am cultivating relationships and attempting to explore more spanish, I have also picked up The Captain's Verses, by Pablo Neruda, and the first poem I read while waiting for the bus a few minutes after I bought it made me sit back on the bench and smile a deep smile. Neruda's Spanish melts away superfluity, and leaves us with emotions of lucid simplicity.

From time to time I think I will post some passages from his poems that strike those membranes deep inside and sound the depths I have been searching for years.
---

from 'el pozo'
-
Mi vida, no hallaras
en el pozo en que caes
lo que yo guardo para ti en la altura:
un ramo de jazmines con rocio,
un beso mas profundo que tu abismo.

This poem is part of 'el pozo' the rest of the poem is beautiful as well, but this section made me sit back and think. I keep for you a kiss deeper than your abyss - what a wonderful use of words to show someone how you feel you could fill any abyss within them with nothing but the love in a true kiss.

A bouquet of dewy jasmines - what a beautiful image. I have no clue what it could have meant to Neruda, but how beautiful. I love dew. It evokes for me a sense of morning awareness, and a freshness that only a new morning can bring.

In English:

---

from 'the well'
-

Darling, you will not find

in the well into which you fall

what I keep for you on the heights:

a bouquet of dewy jasmines

a kiss deeper than your abyss.

Twitterpainted 2009

2009-04-13T09:51:00.002-06:00

Well, my silence lately has been a good one. There has been much going on since returning to the states, and all is well. I haven't been able to take the time so much lately to sit and update my blog, but nonetheless I am writing a ton in my journals, doing a ton on the trail, and living an all around inspired lifestyle on the Olympic Peninsula.

However, at the moment, I am in Winston-Salem, NC visiting a friend I met in Peru. I turned 26 yesterday. The past several years I have taken pictures of all the flowers I can find, but yesterday we drove on the Blue Ridge Parkway, winding through early spring in the oak and pine ridges of Appalachia. We stopped at Mt. Mitchell, highest place east of the Mississippi, where at roughly 6680 feet we had a 360 degree view of the surrounding mountains for long distances.

Spring awakens my spirit every year reminding me who I am, and how vibrant life is. A new leaf, delicate and bright green, slowly unfurling as it bounces around in the warm spring breeze stirs something within me as I stare. It is a feeling that, to me, just feels like perfection.

After several weeks of watching the catkins growing and swelling to an arousing shade of red on the alders along the lakeshore, it finally happened. The leaf buds swell as the pollen tassles lengthen. The chickadees dangle from the branch tips inspecting for larvae poking their black heads from the buds. Then, one day a memory of a song echoes across seasons, and spring is really here. I hear the first excited song of a yellow-rumped warbler coming from the top of a doug-fir standing high next to the lakeside alders. After arriving from somewhere in California or further south, they begin blocking out a territory with their ethereal voice while frantically gleaning larvae and hatching insects from the awakening alder trees.

Within a few days of their arrival, the catkins open, casting powdery waves of condensed sunlight through the warming air. The wind gathers the pollen in streaks across the lake, sometimes reaching several miles unbroken. This year, the catkins on the large alder next to the boathouse opened the day after the warbler arrived at Lesage. I live on the North shore of the lake, where sun is much more abundant, and spring comes a few days earlier. On the South shore of the lake where I work on Barnes Point at OPI, winter holds on a little longer in the shade of Aurora Ridge and Mt. Storm King. The warblers didn't show up there for another 5 days.

With each free day I have, I sit for hours on the deck at Lesage, watching the awakening. The kokanee snatch stoneflies from the surface of the water, while those that escape into the air glitter in the sunlight like snowflakes returning to winter clouds. Stellars Jays hawk through the trees, and tear clumps of moss from the maple branches in search of the recently emerged large black beetles that I have yet to identify. Sometimes I think that I could live forever in the vibrance of this season.

Discerning Circles

2009-03-12T19:57:00.003-06:00

At the edge of the peninsula, waves lick away the feet of mountains. In the center of the peninsula they reach far into the clouds and pull some of the most abundant life out of their misty heights. It seems that here on the Peninsula I can always find a landscape, an ecosystem, a nook or cranny that suits my emotions perfectly.
Some days I may be drawn into the forest, and find myself staring at a moss-laden conifer wider than my childhood bedroom that towers above from a rooted foundation that predates the ‘discovery’ of North America. These trees teach me a lot about true steadfastness in life. Other days, from a canoe I may watch a small yet zealous stream plunge into the lake, spreading rocks it washes from the mountainside into the lake, rocks that were previously washed into the oceans some fifty million years ago. Then after ages of slumbering below the ocean floor, an ongoing dispute between two tectonic plates scraped these sediments back up onto the edge of the continent some twenty million years ago, leaving the Olympic Mountains. Streams like this remind me of what immense growth can come with change.
Today, I find myself staring out the window of the café where I sit overlooking the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and watch a small sailboat bob like a tired seagull in the tide. I scan the restless water for aberrant signs of life. I track the birds cruising in the ebbing tide in hopes of seeing one previously unknown to me. Turning from the window after many minutes, the empty seat across from me momentarily takes me back to where two years ago I sat sharing this view with someone who is no longer here with me. I flinch, and stare back out the window, wondering what place pain has in all this...
Punctuated by sweet sips of white lavender tea, I watch movement around me, but eventually I notice my attention lapping back to the bobbing hull of the small, solitary green and white sailboat as it circles around its mooring a hundred yards offshore. It circles, and circles, never discerning, just circling. In these moments, I am glad I have friends on the water, for they help me realize many things in this world are forever adrift. We may have some say where we go if we are aware of the world around us, but the flow is there to take us along, not to be controlled.

The Lesson of Experience

2009-03-10T09:21:00.004-06:00

The last two months have been an amazing transition to living back in the States. I realized finally the reason I wasn't writing so much was that I was finding it more important to just roll with the flow of life here again, and not to question or reflect too much until I felt ready. I feel wonderful, and, as always, this land and this life on the Olympic Peninsula never ceases to divine the depth of my daily interactions, unearthing a well of inspiration that calms the rapid of life's experiences into pools of calm discriminating currents.

I will get to posting some reflections soon, but until then, there are some words that I read back in high school, again in college, and were shared with me again back in June that now encapsulate some of the pinnacle views I have been experiencing for awhile now. More coming soon! Oh! These words are from the Bhagavad Gita. Read it!

~
Thinking about sense-objects
Will attach you to sense-objects;
Grow attached, and you become addicted;
Thwart your addiction, it turns to anger;
Be angry, and you confuse your mind;
Confuse your mind, you forget the lesson of experience;
Forget experience, you lose discrimination;
Lose discrimination, and you miss life's only purpose.

Renaissance: A Long Awaited Arrival

2009-01-20T23:46:00.003-07:00

Renaissance. This is the word that rang clearly through my mind this morning as I sat in a room of peers out here on the Olympic Peninsula listening to Obama’s Inaugural speech.
Today marks one month that I have been back in the states, and all that matters is after spending 4 very important weeks with family and very dear friends across the country from Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Colorado, to my home here in Washington it is clarity I see surrounding me. It is a clear vision of who I am, and what I want for this life, and this world.
I do not know why, but I have always felt inspired to live a life experiencing new things, from braiding bracelets as a 6 year old, to catching my first native trout as a 15 year old, to throwing pots on a pottery wheel after my science classes at Bucknell, to shooting my first deer with a longbow on my terms in Colorado…There is always something more to learn, something compelling me to search for something that doesn’t bore me in short order. For most of my life, renaissance has meant something much different to me. It has meant simply amassing skills to create things that are useful in my life.
Now, with Peru in memory, I do feel very much like I have been reborn into my country, and I am in love with this life, this opportunity, each moment, every blink. It feels like a true renaissance. Not a sea change, but a long awaited arrival.

I do not know what I will write on this blog this coming spring. The only culture shock I am really recognizing at this point in my readjustment to the U.S. is how I view communication and communicate with people differently than I used to. So, I am going to take some time to think about how I use this website and my writing to communicate this sylvan dream. There is much to come. I am living in a place where my life feels balanced between my mind, body and spirit, and in the balance of these three elements of my life, I feel my light, my love, and joy becoming amplified into pure energy, shining on my surroundings. I wake up in the morning excited to throw back the cover of my sleeping bag, and watch the coming of another day fade from the stars that glitter on the shimmering lake outside my house.
I am also having trouble keeping in touch right now. A phone feels useless to me, and my energy for writing e-mails has waned. It will return, but for now, I hope you all will contact me, and not take my aloofness as nothing more than an indication of how content I am in each moment right here, right now. I want to share this place with you all, but e-mail is not going to do the job. Come out here and love a little bit of this life with me.

Wow, It's the end...

2008-12-18T14:59:00.004-07:00

Well, tomorrow night it is back to the States.

I have been fortunate to watch six full moons in Peru, the last one being just a few days ago in Cusco, during an early morning walk back from the discos as the night was fading to twilight. For awhile, staring up at each moon only made me feel tied to the places on which I could envision that same moonlight shining down - back home, the people, the places, the memories...Until my fourth moon, after a walk on the trails around the research station. Once the other guys climbed in their tents, and ceased rustling around as they wriggled into their sleeping bags, I looked around the moonlit valley, and traced the clouds up to where they just looked like ghostly feathers streaking across the full moon. I felt a fullness in my feet that hadn't been around for awhile. I was rooted there and then.

It is just a simple and trite thought to be truly present in a moment, but it is a thought that I feel constantly challenges me. Finally, I could feel the full weight of where I was, and knew that I was in the right place. That night, it was only once I felt this perfect sensation of placement that I then felt my heart reach back to the places I missed back home, and I know some of those places felt my happiness that night.

Of course six months abroad, living like this has changed my life, taught me much, and given me ample thoughts on how to change my life and those around me for years to come. However, suddenly in less than 30 hours, all I have grown familiar to in the past 6 months will be gone, and I will be dependent on my memories and writings to remind me. I am excited to get back to the life I know I love back in the states, and I am equally excited to see how the life I have developed over this long long trip will complement the coming years.

I will definitely miss Peru extremely, and if I do not return here in the coming years, I will be very surprised. See you all soon.

On the right path...

2008-11-13T15:20:00.003-07:00

I have arrived in Paucartambo for a day to catch up on some e-mails and what not. The following are two journal entries from the recent weeks.

11/8/08
There are days when ya just know ya just got it right, when things seem impossibly good, and then they get a little better.
After a few hours of searching for nests up and down this mountain creek a few miles from the station, the sun finally crested the edge of the deep ravine and cast brilliant blue light into the booming pools of water tumbling past me. There was nothing else that made sense in that moment other than to just get in. So, I laid my backpack, binos, clothing, and boots along side the river on some rocks, and jumped in. Well, no, I eased in, sat down in the water and managed to hyperventilate in the frigid water for about five seconds before I jumped up and out. Some exclamations escaped my lips, who knows what. After a few more minutes in the sun, I felt I was ready for the real shock of swimming up in the rapid where a small torrent fell two feet into the pool that swirled and spit splashes of icy water on my bare skin.
I quickly walked into the edge of the sandy-bottomed pool, jumped into the deepest part, and swam like a frog in the current for perhaps ten seconds before running back out. The pool was just large and deep enough to swim in. The icy water rushing over my eyes, the clarity of the rocks around me - all was perfect. The last time I felt a moment like this in such frigid mountain water was several years ago now, back in Quilcene, Wa. I would ride a borrowed bike down Linger Longer Rd. a few times a week after work and go for a swim in the Little Quilcene river. At the bottom of the deepest hole, I would cling to an exposed tree root, holding myself on the cobblestone creekbed as I stared up at the blue summer skies. A few times swallows glided in the air above, and something seemed oddly perfect to be staring into that realm while kidding myself into feeling aquatic for so long as my lungs allowed.
After laying on the rocks for a few minutes, I decided to hike up the creek and look for some more nests along the banks, and left my clothing behind. There is something about being drenched in frigid water while bathed in intense mountain sunlight that made me stand there smiling, dripping wet and naked, wondering how things could feel any better at that moment. Once I sat back down to warm up and dry off an hour later by my clothing, a few butterflies landed on my legs, probing for salty sweat. Their violet-blue wings mesmermized me as they winked in the late-morning sun.
---
10/28/08
Ever so slowly, I think my travels are revealing to me that I have people in my life, people who influence my thoughts on a daily basis, people I miss when I am away, everyday people I truly love who make me feel at home. For awhile in my life, I felt alone to the point that I felt accustomed to thinking I really was alone, and that I might not be able to find other people who felt the same about life as I did. But as I stare over the mountainside at the misty clouds that blow condensation into my hair, I am finding the elation I feel in seeing such beauty generates an undeniable longing to have some people here with me now. Someone with whom I can argue over the intrinsic value of such so-called nature, someone to share a barely noticeable grinning glance with as two squirrels pass by unaware of us watching from our treestands, someone to lay in a cozy bed with as we lazily watch the sunrise on the mountainside, someone to lay on a blanket with in the sun as the spray from a nearby fountain kisses wispy drops of rain on our bare skin, someone with whom a normal commute to work can become one of the most memorable mornings of the year...
From shadows of such self-imposed times of youthful loneliness, I am finally acknowledging that I have never really been alone at all, and I am beginning to see it´s not only places so far from man´s hand that I need to see, but I need others at my side in whom I know resides a similar glowing ember as green as these forests through which I am so lucky to roam each day. It may be the path less travelled, but that does not make me alone or unique on this path.

Wet and Beautiful

2008-10-25T08:14:00.003-06:00

The early morning light opens my eyes around 5am each morning as it creeps up over the mountaintops on the opposite eastern side of the valley some mile or two away. The mornings are crisp, and the first thing I do as I sit up and slide out of my bivvy sack is put on my sweatshirt that I use as a pillow, and slide on my pants I have beneath my legs where I sleep.

After a year hiatus, the cold mornings have broken me, and I now drink coffee again. Cupping the mug in both my hands, I watch birds flit by on the mountainside as the daylight grows, the clouds sweep up the valley from below, and I await breakfast.

The days are long, slow, and inconcievably enjoyable. I hike thirty minutes or so to my site, and prepare for the morning's work, putting on one thermal layer, raincoat, and rainpants. As I leave the trail and begin creeping up through the thick forest, I half wince, half relish the first cool drops of water that fall on my cheeks from the mossy branches as I weave through the thick vegetation, climbing, half crawling up the mountainside. From time to time, I find myself staring off through the low canopy as thoughts of home, future plans, missed people, or a beautiful birds catch my attention. One morning, a red flash far off through the canopy caught my attention, and I smiled as my eyes focused on the mountain toucan I have been seeing every few days. I called to it through the woods-a mixture of a hen chicken and a veloci raptor-and the toucan's head jerked to the side, slowly shifted 90 degrees, and then jerked to the other side. Over the next twenty minutes I called them to within a few meters of me, and watched them pass in the canopy above before continuing with my work.

Searching for nests is hard and tedious. I think to do this work and not go crazy you must either really love doing, or just be a very diligent person. I just really love roaming through the woods in a grid-like pattern each day taking part in essentially the hunt to end all easter egg hunts. When my eyes fall upon a small grass-lined opening in a ball of moss hanging from the side of a tree, my heart jumps a little bit. Most of the time I reach inside to just find an empty cavity, just a shadow of a home. One time I saw something odd in the obscure darkness of the rainy forest peaking out at me, and as I reached up and poked it in confusion the face of a mouse recoiled from my finger. This old nest had been taken over by a family of five jungle mice. Not what I was looking for.

As I head back up the mountainside on my way back to lunch around 1230, usually the skies have thickened in confusion over whether it was time to rain or not. A thick mist descends upon the mountainside, and for awhile that is all you think it is when suddenly ten minutes later I realize my shoulders are damp and the chill is licking at my sides. I brush my hand over my beard to find it rather wet but not dripping. Each day it seems this is how the rain comes, subtly sneaking dampness into your clothing, making you realize you should have put on your rain gear.

For me, this is a blessed place, a haven, and a mirror into the person I am trying to be.

I would like to write more but my time is up in this small internet cafe in the mountain town in which I have chosen to pass my day off. I hope you all are well.

Macchu Picchu

2008-10-04T13:49:00.005-06:00

Sweat dripped liberally from my brow and into my moustache as I made my way up the side of the mountain towards the entrance to Macchu Picchu. Daylight was just fading to pale blue behind the mountains surrounding me. It felt great to push myself hard up a mountainside again. It had been awhile,

Once we got into the park, people started running ahead like maniacs to the other side of the park to the other entrance to Wayna Picchu, which only allows 400 people a day. Once we had secured a place in line to hike up to Macchu Picchu, I took some time to walk around for some early morning photos before the park got filled with other tourists.

The morning had closed in quickly with cloud cover. The sun shown brightly through the clouds, and as it rose above the mountains on the eastern edge of the valley a single tendril of light reached down to Macchu Picchu for a few minutes.

Once we got our tickets to hike Wayna Picchu later that morning, our 25 year old Peruvian guide, Juan, took us around to show us the city. He highlighted the significance of certain parts of the city, its architecture, and its temples. I estimate I missed a fair amount of what he was saying, since it was all in spanish, but I rathered to stumble through understanding his perfect spanish, than have him struggle to explain himself in broken english. Without seeing this place, explaining much of it isn't that interesting. To see it in person is awing. People always talk about how the rocks line up perfectly, with no gaps whatsoever, and this is true where the most attention was paid, at the temples. All of the temples at Macchu Picchu were essentially built to worship some aspect of the earth that the ancient civilation was grateful for. The earth that nurtured them was their god, and the attention they paid at reflecting nature in their designs and rituals was very acute.

Later, we climbed up to Wanya Picchu, and from there the view was amazing. Macchu Picchu looked like some sand castle inlaid with moss and small rocks. We sat up there for awhile taking in the view, but all in all this was a very different experience for me.

I think this was the first time I have been to a place that is one of the wonders of the world for its natural splendor as well is its human heritage. Given time alone up there, I would have sat for hours observing the place, but as it was, teaming with other tourists, I felt no need to sit and dwell. There were a group of people sitting in a circle in one of the temples up on Wayna Picchu. In some circumstances I could have felt myself doing that, but it wasn't the same. I knew going into it that I would be surrounded by other people who may have very varied reasons to be up there. So, I went up there to try and take in as much of the awesome history and beauty this place has to offer, and enjoy it for that.

Sitting upon Wayna Picchu as I looked at the surrounding valley, mountains, and Macchu Picchu below, I felt a solid pleasure in this civilization's legacy. I found it very enheartening to witness the labor that must have taken lifetimes to build. I saw it as the devout result of an understanding by another human culture that realized there was something much greater than their life, their culture, their humanity. Granted, the work was most likely performed by slaves or the poor of the culture, and there were no doubt many darker sides of this culture that this beautiful relic doesn't depict, but this will be true for anything regarding humanity, be it 2000 years ago, today, or far into the future.

2008-09-24T16:36:00.002-06:00

We pulled our bags from the boat after nosing into the mud and sandbag riverbank at Labrinto this morning, and I decided to step into a corner store to relieve some liquids. I was overcome with a bout of staring as I waited for the bathroom to open up. There were plastic wrappers of food and candy hung all over the walls, and there was a TV in the corner. I was overwhelmed.

Everything went very smoothly getting to Cusco. I have left the steamy thickness of the jungle, and entered the thin chill of the Cusco air. Walking the streets brought a welcomed shortness to my chest. I love living at altitude.

Now it seems time to delve into the gregariously extroverted hostel life style for a few days.

Moving On In One Week

2008-09-15T19:13:00.003-06:00

Well, here I am sitting under a near full moon, one night past, looking back almost four months of life in the jungle here. I haven't left an area about the size of three college campuses in over 4 months. I don't think there has ever been a time in my life I have lived for so long without ever leaving about a 7 kilometer radius. Just going to school each day growing up in Pennsylvania meant going nearly this far from my home.

The time here has brought about quite a mound of experiences, and has given me a period of time I am sure I will continue to reflect on for many years. I have found a pace and satisfaction in this lifestyle that I will continue to value in my daily life. I have found limits in my life that I have been trying to reach for some time. In many ways, living in the jungle around a completely new culture, mixed in with completely new people has acted as a sieve. I feel I am leaving my time here with something very valuable - a clearer picture of what this life is all about.

In one week, I will be getting on a boat with my two backpacks and guitar, taking a 3 hour ride downriver in a motorized wooden canoe, then taking a one hour drive over a huge, dusty, and rocky road to the airport, and flying to Cusco. I will rest and relax in Cusco, adapting to the elevation for about seven days before heading off into the mountains in a bus to another ACCA field station, named Wayqecha, which I believe is the Quechua for Friend, or Brother. The station there is situated on the mountainsides, at about 9000 feet asl, within a cloud forest. I do not know what it looks like yet obviously, but from what I have been told, it should fit my passions accurately, and in a totally different way than the jungle has.

I will be at this field station until early December. Over the next two months, I will surely have much time to reflect on my thoughts and notes about my lifestlye in the jungle, all the while experiencing very new ways of life in the high cloud forests of the Andes - a completely new landscape, climate, accent, assemblage of birds and wildlife all together, all draped in moss, bromeliads, and orchids, or so I am told.

Please Keep in Touch!

Long-Awaited Rain

2008-09-12T11:42:00.001-06:00

8/28/08

The rain took its time, but it got here. It was a hard and sustained thunderstorm, beautiful with sweet tasting rain that soaked my hair and beard as I ran around with Meredith in the soccer field. In just ten minutes, the field was two or three inches deep in some places. The rain brought a fresh and reviving coolness back to my skin that it hadn’t felt since early June.
As I stood there licking rain from my moustache, I watched Meredith dance around in the rain like a ballerina. It made me think back to a time when I was perhaps thirteen or fourteen, on one of the last days of school, when a small group of friends came over to my house, and an early summer thunderstorm came too.
We were standing outside plucking sweet honeysuckle blossoms from the large bush growing next to our burning barrel in the back yard when the winds blew in over the ridge behind my house. Ten minutes later, puddles and rivulets of rain water ran down my driveway, picking up heat from the asphalt as it went. We kicked and splashed the hot water at each other, which felt oddly disgusting. We followed the water into my yard, running and sliding through the grass in our bare feet as we went down the hill behind my house, across the path leading to other houses, through an unused field, and into the 5 foot wide and 3 foot deep ditch running between some houses and the woods.
What would start out with shy wading and playful splashing would slowly bring out the true countryside boys we were. In five minutes time we would all be thigh deep in the muddy torrent, wrestling and dunking each other. Every boy knew from many learned experiences that any fine wrestling match in the water was never complete without savage and repeated dunking matches, ranging from hair pulling to full-fledged over the head, back suplexes. Once we got one another down into the frothy slurry, it was always important to dunk them two or three times, making sure that each successive dunk was more impressive than the last. In between bouts of all-out dunking wars, we would try to swim in the mini rivers, or we would just sit down in them and see who could get rolled the farthest in the current.
Games like this growing up were always competitions, but it wasn’t really about the competition. I find it surprising how even from a very young age, most of the games we learn as kids are simply precursors to the life we lead as adults. Of course we don’t realize anything of the sort at the time, but who is it from that we learn how to play? Who is it from that we learn to be a boy, who later becomes a man? Games are simply intimations of the hierarchical trappings of society. The best memories of mine are often based on games like this. For us boys, it was one of the only times it was considered normal to be running, giggling, wrestling, and having all out loving fun.
Sooner or later, one of the house owners close to the gutter would peak out the back door and yell at us, “Get outta that gutter!” They probably would have complained about how we were on their property and it was dangerous for kids to play in such gutters. However, deep down I think adults who have forgotten how to be a kid themselves at heart jealous and bitter towards those who still know how to have pure fun themselves.
Meredith continued to dance in the rain, as she was accustomed to doing, and I continued to walk around sucking the sweet rain from my facial hair, looking up into the sky as rain fell heavily upon us, feeling a bit of a heavy heart at not really having a way to show how joyful I was of the rain. Sure, people can say, “If you want to dance, dance. If you want to giggle and run around in the rain, do it,” but that’s not the point. The point is how amazing formative experiences can be in the rest of our lives.
I stood there in the rain, missing my childhood friends, and while I smiled at the wonderful memories I had of playing in the rain, I longed for a close friend to play and wrestle around with in the vibrant rain.

Otorongo

2008-09-08T12:18:00.006-06:00

The sound of rain on the thatch roof was the second thing I noticed after slowly becoming aware it was time to take a step outside to relieve all the refresco I had drank at dinner the night before. I reached between the mosquito net and the bed, and felt numbly around for my alarm clock on the floor - 438am, two minutes before my alarm. I walked through the wet grass over to the edge of the forest, and turned off my head lamp to look up into the skies. Despite the light rain falling, it was still possible to see some stars shining through the breaks.

I turned to walk back towards the dormitory, and as I turned my headlamp back on, two bright yellows lights caught my eye on the edge of the forest. Only once I looked up at them did I realize they were actually eyes and not lights shining back at me from less than 20 feet away. They looked huge, and they were several inches separated. They were perhaps 6 inches off the ground, so for a second I figured it was some large rodent making its way to the fish carcass someone else had left laying out in front of the dormitory. A second later a shot of adrenaline pushed my heart into my throat as the eyes lifted to about three feet off the ground, then a second later dropped back to a few inches from the ground. My jaw dropped, and I froze. I could envision the animal moving perfectly behind those eyes. I was still several steps away from the stairs leading back to the dormitory door, and as I slowly took the steps, my light illuminated the animal's face, the lines running along its nose, and the spots along its cheek bones. It was a jaguar.

The local name for the Jaguar is, Otorongo. This apparently means, kills in one silent leap.

The fear I had always imagined feeling at seeing a big cat in the wild became reality. A sickness welled up within my stomach, and all I could concentrate on was getting inside. I slowly made it to the top of the steps, gazed at the jaguar's unerring stare for one more eery second, then turned and walked as quickly as I could to the door.

I laid back down in bed a minute later, and waited for the adrenaline to get out of my system. I stared at the cieling until twilight began to show through the plastic covering the apex of the roof, then I got up and went to eat some breakfast.

I have wanted to see a big cat for so long, because I always thought it would be one thing I knew could frighten me to the bone. The way those eyes stared into me was captivating and terrifying. From the time I looked at them, to the time I got back to the door I never took my eyes off them, yet all my mind was screaming, "GET AWAY!!!"

That was a fear I have never felt before. It was a fear of self preservation. It was not cool, it was not exciting, it was exactly what I expected. Although it was maybe thirty seconds long, not once did anything cross my mind other than concentrating doing whatever I had to do to remain in the same state I was in at that moment - alive.

That being said, I want to see another one, but you can bet your ass I am a little more scared to walk to my cabin at night.

Notable Thoughts and Moments

2008-09-07T12:01:00.003-06:00

I am trying to post more, but I have been busy trying to keep up with my real journal on a daily basis. So, here are some short thoughts, events, or quotes from the past week.

8/28/08

“If I can’t walk outside and piss in my own damned yard, then I ain’t livin’der.”

This is just something that made me laugh out loud in response to a thought I was having one day as I was walking outside to pee. When I think about the places that I have lived and I loved the most, I have always just been able to walk outside and pee in the yard, and it turns out the places I haven’t liked so much, I couldn’t walk outside and pee without risk of cops showing up. Accordingly of course, I had to throw some good ole Pa accent in it.

“The surrender to Nature’s irrational, strangely confused formations produces in us a feeling of inner harmony with the force responsible for these phenomena.” ~ Demian, Hermann Hesse

This is a quote that struck me perfectly as I was reading Demian for the third time this week. It may not be as striking out of context, but I hope it will compel some people to look up the book. It has been very influential in opening my eyes inwardly.

I doubt there will be few times in my life when I can say something as abnormal as,

“Yeah, I didn’t get too much sleep last night, the night monkeys were raising hell in the trees outside my cabin all night.”

One night, there were monkey making so much noise outside my cabin maybe 15 feet from my head. Since the cabins are screened in, it was rather noisy. They were fighting, cooing at each other, and yelping as they jumped through the trees, and it seemed as soon as they disappeared for awhile, then they were right back. How often am I going to be awakened by rare nocturnal monkeys...

And finally... I saw a jaguar yesterday morning, staring at me from less than 20 feet away. Hopefully, I will find some time to write about this later today, or soon.

A Good Morning - Pt. 2

2008-08-27T13:41:00.002-06:00

It was an early morning. We headed back down the trail towards CM1, (the other research station) and met Marco waiting for us by the boats. He yanked the modified lawn mower engine to life, and a moment later we were lurching upstream in the river. We squinted into the sun as we looked around the river banks and into the clear blue skies for animals.
Bright white egrets stalked around wooden debris jutting into the river, plucking unwary minnows from the current, while most of the large Cucoi herons perched stoicly upon the tree trunks speckled around us in the river. Their wings slumped away from their sides, and their beaks hung agape as their throats undulated, panting air like a dog.
Once in awhile some of them would become a little too uncomfortable as we passed in the vibrating peki-peki, and with a lazy, fluid motion they would crouch and turn away from us, them jump into the air like a puppet, as if they had just been lifted by invisible strings. A few feet into the air they opened their wings, casting a wide shadow across the water a foot or two below them. With slow, labored wingbeats they float away through the air, craning their neck momentarily to be sure they are not being pursued. Through my binoculars I follow their wingtips as they pass barely an inch above the water with each stroke. I smile, catching a few swirls in the water where their wings come closest to the surface. They are such a large bird, yet they master such delicate and graceful flight.
Up ahead I see an odd, black, lanky form sticking up from the water’s edge. What at first appears to be an animal, then an odd tree stump, turns out to be a spider monkey wading in the water up to its chest. I point it out to every one else just as it spots us coming up river. It turns to run back across shore, stopping momentarily on the long river bank to stare us down, then turns and continues running the fifty meters of so across the large gravel bank until it disappears into the safety grass close to the trees. It appeared as though it was about to swim across the fiver, but perhaps it was just seeking to cool off and have a drink on this very hot day.
Waves of heat rippled over the sandbar like mirages in the desert. Above us, a cloud of kites, vultures, falcons, and storks swirled around in the thermal, quickly rising into the sky. With the river being so low recently, these exposed riverbanks create perfect islands of heat, which these birds take advantage of to navigate long distances, sometimes only flapping several times an hour.
As we leave the sand bar behind us, I look ahead upriver to see the storks cruising out ahead of us now. Wings slightly curved, I could see the feathers close to their body rippling in the wind as they accelerated past us. Just as they were getting low enough for me to see the black and white of their wings again, they broke out of the descent, banking back into the lazy swirl of another thermal rising above the next sandbar perhaps a half mile upstream. In the two or three minutes it took for us to get directly beneath them again, they had become specks in the sky once more. Looking over my shoulder, they dropped out of the thermal and descended rapidly towards the horizon, disappearing over the jungle canopy to the next unseen thermal lying just upstream around the river bend.
Amidst one of these clouds of climbing birds, I watched several falcons and kites stoop down out of the sky upon some unseen prey below. Dropping several hundred feet in only a few seconds, I can rarely help but gasp or yell to draw the spectacle to other’s attention. I watched one Plumbeous kite drop towards the sandbar, grappling with some smaller creature the size of a huge dragonfly or a hummingbird for a few seconds before pulling out of the stoop to avoid hitting the ground. I watched the prey streak away in the other direction inches off the ground, still unsure as to whether it was a hummingbird or a dragonfly. Down here, they are of very similar sizes.
While the air may feel fresh as the peki-peki labours upstream, once we land back at CICRA, the air sits heavily upon us again. By the time we have arrived at the top of the staircase some 240 steps later, sweat drips from my face, but at least it is lunch time, which means some cool, sweet refresco awaits my parched lips.

A Good Morning - Pt.1

2008-08-27T13:38:00.003-06:00

We went down to CM1 this morning in attempts to finish collecting data for the final birds we need to finish collecting at one of our three field sites. Today, we were simply attempting to record the songs of four birds that we had already caught in mist nets during the previous weeks. While we sat in wait for the birds to show up in response to the speakers sitting along the trail shouting their song into the forest, the sun rose through the trees, and sweat quickly began to dampen my shirt. A family of howler monkeys moved through the trees high in the canopy above us, stopping momentarily to gaze at us as we stared through out binoculars. A moment later I could hear the sounds of their urine showering down through down the leaves. Excremental bombs slapped upon the forest floor with a smack – a howlers attempt to help potential threats keep their distance. Luckily this morning the air was moving away from us through the forest, wafting the dank smell of zoo away from where Claire and I sat. We took a few photos of some interesting green, blue, red, and black grasshoppers that glide through the air on bright white wings after shooting themselves into the air. Walking down the trail some days, we encounter a pocket of fifteen or twenty of these hoppers, and they explode around us like a mini fireworks display surrounding us beneath the shade of the forest canopy.
Finally, we hear the call of one of our subject species calling back to us from up the trail. Without a word, Claire and I pace quickly towards the singing bird. She hands me the speakers as she pulls the microphone from a leather holster and untangles the chord from the recorder. Crouching at the trail’s edge once we get close enough to the bird, she begins recording the bird as it sings in defense of its territory. The screen of the recorder jumps erratically as it records the song, along with the toucans and cicadas screaming in the canopy above. As long as we can get close enough to the bird while it sings, it should be loud enough to differentiate the notes of the bird we want from the ambient noise of the forest, which can become deafening some days. With the last month’s dry heat, the katydids and cicadas have come out in full force, mastering the sound waves of the mid-day heat. After 830 or 9 in the morning, some places in the forest are overcome with a cacophony of this insect chorus. A few days previous, Claire and I sat waiting almost an hour for the insects to quiet down so that the birds could actually hear the speakers playing their song over the noise of the forest. Claire and I sat and talked, laughing as we had to nearly yell at each other to be heard.
Once Claire recorded enough songs for later computer analysis, she gives me a knod, and I step off the trail into the forest to search for the singing bird. In order for our recorded songs to be useful, we have to be 100% sure that each bird we record is the individual we think it is since their song is being analyzed in conjunction with blood samples we have already taken during previous visits. Sometimes it is simple. If we are lucky, the birds are drawn in close enough by the phantom intruder that we can see their identifying color bands from the trail. However, more often than not, these birds seem to have some recollection of what happened the last time they laid chase to an intruder in their territory. So, while they will sing in defense of their territory, the more often we visit their territory, the less likely they are to come close enough for us to see their leg bands.
Today, we are lucky. After changing position in the forest three times, I got back out onto the trail and ran ahead of the birds as they worked their way farther from us. I sat waiting, and each minute, their call got closer and closer, until they came hopping and flitting past me. While trying to track them through dense foliage about 2 feet off of the ground, I desperately attempted to keep them in focus and spot the color bands around their legs. At each perch these birds spend about three seconds or less standing still. So, once they move, I have just that amount of time to try and follow them, focus, see the colors on their legs, attempt to tell whether it is male of female, decide on which legs the color bands are and, if I can see really well, attempt to decide what combination the bands occur on each leg. Sometimes there are up to four bands on each bird, two per leg. It is often as simple as just spotting one or two of these bands, and knowing whether it was on the female or male. Then, I can go to the data book, and check the combination with the individual we think it is to be sure of its identity. However, once in awhile we have birds living close to each other, and while we attempt to not let it occur, every once in awhile neighbours may end up with similar color combinations, making it very important to see exactly what is on each bird’s leg. Today, I was able to see a yellow band on the right leg of the male as he perched sideways two inches off the ground for about two seconds, and about two minutes later I got the female’s combination-red on the left leg, white and silver on the right-as she perched just barely within view sideways on a sapling two feet off the ground. Thus it only took about thirty minutes of following them around in the woods today before we realized some success. This part of the research is by far the most challenging and my favorite part of this work, and it allows me to put to use skills I have been attuning since I was a child. It is not very dissimilar from the way I grew up hunting. For I must be somewhat quiet as I stalk the bird, I must get close to it and, just as I need to be accurate enough to shoot something to kill it, I have to be skilled, quick, and accurate with my binoculars to spot the bird and read the color bands on its leg. Even better, in the end I walk away successful, yet still having killed nothing.

Blog Problems

2008-08-21T16:57:00.002-06:00

I am sorry for the silence on my blog. I have been away on and off at another research station where I do not have internet access. It has been nice to get away from it here and there.

However, I returned after this last trip to find the lower row of my keyboard is not functioning anymore,thus I cannot sign into my computer. So, this will no doubt limit my blogging until I am able to hopefully have a new keyboard sent to Cusco, where I pick it up the end of september, and hopefully everything will be ok. Until then, I hope to update when possible, and keep in touch via e-mail if you would like to get in touch with me.

2008-08-09T09:56:00.002-06:00

Mi Cabana

The majority of the land that the research station (CICRA) I am living at rests on is a large clearing, perhaps roughly five football fields in total area. There are four main large buildings that are perhaps the size of an average American house. These buildings are framed in concrete; the rest is made of wooden framing, and thatched roof. There is no wood paneling really to make walls, so the building is pretty much a wooden frame closed in screen mesh.
This lends the feeling of being outside at all times, and thus being indoors only really means respite from the bugs,
and the rain, but the roofs leak a little bit. While I am sure some families have air conditioning somewhere in Peru, I have only heard of air conditioning in banks, and that was in Lima. Around the rest of the station are a meager smattering of nice cabins, and a football (soccer) field where we play a few times a week.
Behind the station, a sand trail leads back to the water tower. Water is pumped from an adjoining spring into large plastic drums lifted high in the concrete tower. This height provides enough pressure to push the water through several hundred feet of pipes to the main buildings and surrounding cabins, some of which have bathrooms. On the way to the water tower, a few small paths jut off from the main sand path.
These small paths lead to about five other small cabins peppered through the jungle. These are also wooden frame cabins with thatch roofs, screened in with mesh. These cabins are set up in size and layout like a double college dorm room, but usually only one person sleeps in them.
In the oppressive mid-day heat, I find my cabin quite relieving. Even as I write this, hanging in my hammock wearing only mesh shorts, I am still sweating. As soon as we return from our fieldwork for the day, I retreat to the cold showers close to my cabin, and relish in the frigid water as it pours over my head and chest delightfully.
I often look out the screen to watch some capuchins or tamarins moving past in the trees just outside, and imagine myself standing in some mountain waterfall. I spend the afternoon writing, playing my guitar, or reading, but it usually ends with me waking up an hour or two before dinner to squirrel monkeys and brown capuchins crashing through the trees around my cabin.
Many nights I return to my cabin shortly after dinner. Laying my bag next to my nightstand, I grab a lighter, and light a few candles that I have stuck into some old spirit bottles. Each candle burns for several hours, so the twenty four candles I bought almost two months ago now are just starting two dwindle. I hang my hammock up, pull my bed stand over to my side, and spend the rest of the evening usually just like the afternoon. I read, write, or play my guitar until it is late enough to go to bed, or I just fall asleep by candlelight.
Large moths and other insects ping loudly against the screen closest to the candlelight. I feel bad for the damage I must be causing to these large beautiful moths as they slam against my cabin, but then figure there is little difference between these large moths and all the minute flies that fall beside the candle with a sizzle and pop every few minutes - no difference besides my valuing a charismatic moth over a biting fly. Inevitably, I let the thought fade out of my mind, for I am thankful to have the light of these candles over electric running into the cabin.
Soon after I hear the generator cut out around 930, I decide it is time to sleep. Brushing my teeth on my porch, I dodge some moths bombing at my headlamp while simultaneously whale spouting my mouthful of water and toothpaste into the dark. I stand around for a minute or two scratching my chest as I look around, to be sure there is nothing else I am forgetting to do before bed. I then blow out the candles, half the nights playing karate kid, punching or kicking the candles out with a puff of supreme prowess any eight year old would be jealous of. I slide under the small space where my mosquito net is not tucked under the mattress, and then shake the sand off my feet as I sit on the edge of the bed. In the few minutes it usually takes to fall asleep, I lay on my back wide-eyed, looking into the night. Sooner or later they are usually met with a ghostly green glow. I sit up and look around, to find a small firefly swirling around outside my cabin. Some nights I can hear wings sputtering in the air like some oversized beetle treading through the air. This is another, much larger firefly. A pale green light glows when it lands on the overhang of the roof, but as soon as it takes off, it is replaced by a halo of bright orange light shining from its abdomen.
Some nights, a large gecko softly scampers across the screening close to my head, but most nights it is a mouse-like marsupial. Loudly and relentlessly they scamper back and forth, up over my roof, and eventually down the inside of my wall. Before moving into the cabin, I used to wake up to nice little marsupial gifts in the form of excrement on my floor or on some hanging clothing, but in this cabin, they don’t bother me that much. So, whereas I used to get out of bed and smack them with a sock, I only do that here if they don’t leave after awhile.
I dream the night away, half of the time waking up thrashing my foot or arms in the midst of some crazy dream. One night I woke up throwing my pillow as I sat up abruptly in bed. My pillow and headlamp bounced off the mosquito net and landed on my legs. I laughed out loud. I don’t know exactly why, I but I have very intense dreams here. Luckily, they are almost all good now. Luckily, despite all this restless dreaming, I feel rather rested when it is time to get up. Three or four days a week I find myself with enough energy to get up early to do yoga. I had been teaching Frances while she was here, but now since she has left to return to college, I get up at 4am to do yoga by candlelight before heading off to work at 530. My mind slowly lets go of the night, and I feel the tension leave my neck and back as I move through sun salutations. Cockroaches often shoot from the dancing shadows across my hands or stomach when I am lying on my back doing crunches. However, they are rather common here, and don’t have as much of a disgusting connotation as they do back home. The mornings are nicest when a calm breeze rustles through the trees, refreshing the air in my cabin, bringing a slight coolness to the sweat forming across my back. The rest of the mornings I get up around 450am, and head up to the comedor for a quick breakfast before we head out on the trail a bit before sunrise.

Thoughts about Expectations

2008-08-03T07:21:00.006-06:00

7/24/08

Early one morning I was dreaming about two random people I have never seen having a discussion after a high school English class. The teacher was a young, frumpy lady wearing an amorphous green muumuu-like dress. The student was essentially the same, but younger. The girl was having trouble finishing any writing assignments in class. After some prodding from the teacher, the girl shared that she wasn’t allowed to write about what she wanted because people wouldn’t like it, and they would make fun of her.
The teacher sighed and sloughed down into a chair next to the girl. Then she shared a similar story how she has wanted to write a book her whole life, but she felt that no one wanted to read a book written by a woman like her.
As I watched this scene unfold, a quote materialized, and as if I was watching television, a torn strip of old parchment scrolled through my vision like a marquee screen. Written fluidly with a quill, I read the following words in black ink,

“Society isn’t stopping us from doing anything. Only our perception of what society expects us to do keeps us from accepting the possibility of our dreams as reality.”

As I read this quote, the scene behind it dissolved into a deep green curtain, and the quote echoed in my mind. I slowly realized I was waking up from a dream, and listened as a voice resounded the quote again. I sat up in my bed, checking my clock to see it was 359am, one minute before my alarm was to go off. I slinked beneath my mosquito net, grabbed my journal laying on my bed stand, and quickly scribbled down the quote as my dream faded.

A few years ago, I was sharing some thoughts about life with a close friend. While we were chatting, I remember writing to him a thought of mine stating expectations are poison. I feel that the emergence of this quote in my dreams brings about an evolution of this original view regarding the potential negative effect of expectations.
Expectations about the way we want events in our life to unfold poison the potential of enjoying the reality of each moment before us. Rather, perhaps it is our connection to our expectations that bring about pain. It is ok to expect a certain outcome of an event, but to become attached to this outcome, something that isn’t even real yet, what use is that? Perhaps only once we have ceased to expect desirable (expected) outcomes can we accept each moment as it comes. Void of such expectations we begin to live in the reality of each moment, and I feel only then do we truly begin to live.
This quote suggests that the expectations with which society weighs us down impose a sense of self-denial on our daily life. Our perspective of society poisons our mind into believing that while we have freedom of choice in our life, we still have guidelines that society expects us to follow. These pervasive expectations of our society can easily make us forget that dreams are the impetus for change in this world. Unhappiness comes from the faulty belief that we cannot turn our dreams into reality. Do not let your perception of what society expects of you keep you from bringing change about in this world.

Of Dreams and Delusions

2008-07-25T12:34:00.003-06:00

7/23/08

Several years ago while still studying at Bucknell, one day I checked a science news website to read “New Bird Species Found!” Following the link, I learned how a previously known species had just been discovered in Belize, where it had never been seen before. As a picture of the bird popped up next to the article everything else melted away for a few moments, as I stared motionlessly at an electric blue bird with a deep purple throat and a doll-like yellow eye that seemed to stare vacuously at me from the webpage. Learning that discoveries like this were still occurring in the world began to revive my childhood dreams of visiting South America to behold such exuberant examples of beauty for myself. I showed this photo to many people, and eventually the image crept into the deeper folds of my mind. I found myself taking leave from my class conversations to daydream about trudging through a dense and steamy jungle someday, to hopefully look up one day and see this bird standing before me.
Since receiving the newest field guide on the birds of Peru for Christmas, I often flipped to the page where this cotinga stood staring back at me. I would stare at the bird for long periods of time, lost in its beauty, as if just to stare at it might give me some premonition, some calling as to where I could find it waiting in the forest.
---
Searching for birds is not much different than the pursuit of some coveted love affair. If I was a woman, I would be forever skeptical of a ‘birder’. One needs only to sit around them for a few minutes before their painfully obvious obsession with beauty becomes apparent. While the type of man undoubtedly varies across many spectrums of creepiness, pretentious-ness, and other similar adjectives, all of these men have this weak obsession for beauty in common. For many of these men, I believe this obsession for birds is a reaction, as well as a coping mechanism, to horribly failed relationships in which love was mistaken for obsession and acquisition of beauty.
While I find myself falling somewhere in the midst of this category, I feel in the end it is how you appreciate an object for what it is, not what status it holds in your mind. Beneath a dress, they may seem like the most beautiful breasts, but when the dress is finally slumped against the wall in a pile on the floor, you are still just looking at breasts. The same holds true for birds. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That is all.
However, despite this realization, I unwittingly felt such youthful aspirations seeping back into my mind, and I was awash in my teenage self. As I let the promise of this bird’s beauty lull me into obsession, I was once again balancing on the line separating reality and covetous delusion.
---
While out on a walk looking for birds today by myself, I stopped in a sunny clearing where a bamboo-like plant called carrizo grows tall. Amidst this field of carrizo, a few old trees stand alone beneath the blazing sun. Hearing a woodpecker tapping away, I began to randomly scan one of these trees in search of it. I followed the trunk of the tree up to its shady canopy, and suddenly there was a burst of electric blue in my binoculars. My mouth dropped wide open. Sitting motionlessly, its bright yellow eye shining back at me eerily; there was the Plum-Throated Cotinga.
And so, there it was, a bird I have been dreaming about seeing for three years. I looked around, as if someone should suddenly have appeared for me to high five. Clinging to the projected meaning of this moment, I let out a little yell, did a little booty dance on the trail, seriously I did, and then looked through my binoculars again. In doing this, I was reminded of what it now meant for me to check off a dream on the list.
Seeing this bird doesn’t necessarily make this day or this six-month trip any more special than it would have been without it, but it symbolizes the culmination of a dream that has lived in me for a long time. When dreams become reality, it is easy fool yourself into sentimentally clinging to the moment, as if you can remain crystallized in its revelry, but from such sentimentality often comes a skewed and painful understanding of reality. The challenge in realizing a dream come true is in treating it as you would any other moment of your life. Each moment has its clear meaning, which does not vary from one to the next.
In this way, I feel I am learning how to navigate my life through a matrix of dreams. While each dream I find shining in the night sky may tell me I am on the right path, the night would be rather dark and lonely without all the other stars in the sky. So, while realizing my dreams gives me bearing on which to set course for future dreams, I try to seek out and enjoy the light that each moment shines on me. And with some time and diligent, concerted effort, I may slowly learn how to perceive the reality of each moment as a dream come true. Until then, I at least know I am on the right path.

El Aguajal

2008-07-22T03:19:00.006-06:00

note: If any of these photos aren't uploading properly, please make a comment or e-mail so I can correct the issue. Uploading and posting photos is difficult at times from a remote satellite link in the Amazon.

7/20/08

Hoping to find an area where the researchers and hunters don’t frequent, Frances and I chose to visit some rather neglected trails here at CICRA for our Sunday hike. After another wonderfully lazy breakfast of pancakes with strawberry jam and queso and a bowl of papaya, we headed out onto the trail.
Thirty minutes later we turned onto a little known trail, Mauritia, named named for one of the most abundant species of palms we would soon find ahead. After navigating around several downed trees, the trail plunged down into the aguajal, or palm swamp, after only a few hundred meters. What in a forest is a simple trail of dirt, becomes a matrix of miniature islands in the aguajal. Rootwads of various swamp plants create unsteady stepping-stones amidst a sea of murky swamp water and mud. At first, we spent much time attempting to avoid getting wet, but it only took about fifteen minutes before we both had fallen in up to our thighs, filling our boots with murky, tepid swamp water.

photo by: Frances Buerkens

Around the edges of the swamp, the palm trees grow densely enough to form a shady canopy. In such shade, vines creep along palm trunks, and multicolored lichens blotch the bark like an abstract artist’s canvas.

photo by: William Minehart

Small clumps of saplings and other brush fill in the spaces between the larger palms, otherwise we Frances and I would be not be able to manage this wading hike at all. Surrounded by bright silver columns of the palm trunks that shine with various shades of green disorients you with a beautiful monotony. While managing one stretch of particularly wobbly islands, I paused for a moment straddling the muck we had still been avoiding, I looked over to see this odd creature that seemed more like it should be in Alice in Wonderland than here in a palm swamp. I giggled a little bit, calling it to Frances' attention so she could take a picture of it.

photo by: Frances Buerkens

As we work our way farther into the center of the swamp, the trees spread out, giving way to thick meadows of aquatic grasses and sedges, sometimes thick enough to walk over, but often not. Having abandoned hopping from island to island of sparse vegetation awhile ago, we took to wading through the swamp with abandon, each of us gasping as we unexpectedly slumped into holes up to our thighs or hips. We periodically stopped to pour the chocolate water out of our boots and to wring out our socks, but the pointlessness of this quickly became apparent.

Thick stalks of vanilla orchids become numerous towards the center of the swamp; sometimes obscuring almost all the palm trunk they grow on. Fed by an endless supply of water below, thick waxy leaves the size of basset hound ears glow an illuminant lime green, contrasting sharply with the yellow haze bearing down on everything beneath the mid-day sun.

Small tufts of waxy white bristly leaves stick out from small crevices on surrounding saplings and palm bark. Some of these minute bromeliads are scarcely greater than the old growth communities of hair growing from a grandfather’s useless ears, while some others resemble large pineapples. Long red spikes extend from this prickly plant when flowering times arrive. Blossoming, they unfurl trumpeting tongues of some the most stunningly contrasting electric yellows, oranges, reds, and purples. These flowers offer a surprising vibrance from a plant that is otherwise dull and seemingly perpetually on the verge of death.
Small periwinkle pedals glinting in the bright sun caught my eyes as we waded through the swamp. These petite blossoms reminded me of snapdragons back home, yet they hung from the tips of the grass stalks.
Ahead a small inflorescence of white and yellow flowers coming from a terrestrial orchid bobbed in the breeze just above the surrounding vegetation. A few of the nearby plants had mature seed pods that were beginning to split open to spread their powdery seeds into the wind as they dried out. I picked a few off the stalk, broke them in my hands, threw them into the air, and with my most god-like voice said, “I am the disperser, go forth and reproduce!” A modest cloud of white powder spilled out of the airborne ovaries, and quickly dissipated like a puff of smoke into the breeze. Frances and I chuckled for a moment, and then waded on.

photo by: Frances Buerkens

Pausing under the shade of some larger palms along the way, we scanned our surroundings as we shared some water and cookies. Only occasionally breaking the relative silence, we commented on the animal paths of varying sizes zigzagging across our so-called trail, or stopped to watch a spider move around its web. The spider webs here prove to be quite strong. We traced one long guy line from a web almost ten feet to a nearby palm tree after it got caught on my earring as I tried to pass. We avoided breaking any webs when possible, but some were inevitably covering the easiest way for us to pass through this rather strenuous path. One line snapped as loudly as loudly as the tip of a 6x fly-line as Frances pulled it from our path. At another spot we stopped to take a few photos of a large spider perched in the center of its illuminated web. As we jockeyed for perfect photo position, we noticed it was suddenly spinning an unfortunate fly in a coffin of silk.

photo by: William Minehart

As we worked our way back out of the swamp, the palms closed back in around us, and we often found ourselves following more of a tapir path than anything man-made. We jumped from time to time, as flat sticks protruding from the mud immediately resembled the head of a snake. Frances let out a shriek as we came around one corner, but she began laughing in mid air as she jumped back. I looked down to see the black and yellow head of a tortuga peaking around at us uneasily from its shell.

photo by: William Minehart

For many people, I suppose continually sinking up to your thighs every few steps may not be the ideal six hour Sunday hike, but Frances and I both commented on the pleasant pace of travel a swamp demands. Over four and a half hours, we covered a meager 3.5 km of swamp. Sometimes one hundred meters would take five to ten minutes. At this pace, your eyes have much more time to see the little things they are designed to filter out when one is hiking much faster on a well-traveled dirt trail. Here’s to slowing down. What are not allowing your senses time to perceive?

La Dia de las Garrapatas

2008-07-19T14:18:00.000-06:00

7/11/08

I hit the snooze alarm more times this morning than I care to admit. I finally woke up lying on my back with one arm draped over my face. Slowly coming to consciousness, I realized the sounds outside did not match me lying in bed. The first birds were beginning to sing, and the howlers were growling to life, but usually Claire and I were on the trail already when I heard these noises. I rolled over to reach for my alarm, but knocked it to the floor. Wrestling with my mosquito net, I climbed halfway beneath my bed before finally finding that I had ten minutes to be ready for work. No Good.
I was surprised by how much my damp pants had dried during the night as I slid them on. Pulling a damp shirt from the musty armoire, I felt what I thought to be ants begin to crawl all over my hands. Dropping the shirt to the floor, I looked into the armoire. My headlamp illuminated a mass of brown termites building a tunnel system beneath my clothing. Shaking my head in mild disgust, I shuffled the remaining clothes around my armoire to disturb their construction with small hope that it would perhaps encourage their departure by the time I returned in the afternoon. Leaving my usual shirt on the ground with the termites, I slid my last semi-clean cotton shirt on, and headed out the door.
Luckily Don Pasqual already had some breakfast ready for a group of students who were departing early. So, I bolted a plain fried egg sandwich with some stale bread, slid on my rubber boots, and headed out with Claire.
While we often run into a few groups of monkeys beginning their morning commute between feeding spots, or see several interesting species of birds during the nearly hour-long walk to our sites each morning, many days are rather uneventful. Some mornings, I look up to see we have arrived to our work site with surprise. Despite this, I am finding these mornings equally cathartic. While I am not present in the moment before me, giving my mind time to churn through distracting thoughts of challenging memories and future choices get me closer to focusing on the present.

The first pair of birds proved to be unresponsive to our speakers today. So, we moved down the trail to our second pair, which we weren’t even sure to be a new pair or not since we were so close to the first territory. We set up the net; continually removing snagged bamboo brush from it. We returned to the shadows after turning on the playback speakers to lure the birds into the net, hopefully.
As soon as we sat down, we noticed two Bullet Ants locked in battle atop a bamboo stem (These ants are named so because their sting apparently feels like being shot). This must have been serious, for these usually solitary creatures aren’t seen together very often, which is odd for the majority of ant species that usually thrive only within the shelter of a highly social hierarchy. One individual stood stoically atop the cut bamboo stem while below him, half inside the stem, another ant, which I presumed to be another male, clutched one of the first ant’s legs in his jaws. Curling his abdomen while upside down, he continually reached for the other male attempting to deliver one of their legendary stings. They stayed relatively motionless like this until we looked up a few minutes later to find two birds hanging in the net. These would be the first of this species (Hypocnemis subflava) Claire and I had caught.
After making our way carefully along the nets to the birds, I placed the male into a cotton bag and pulled the draw string after removing him from the net, and then helped Claire remove a difficult tangle where the net had become looped around the female’s head with two separate strands of netting.
Claire pulled the male out of the bag after sitting down, and I hung the bag with the female in it on one of the bamboo spurs next to our work spot on the trail, then slid on a long sleeved shirt to keep the insects off while we worked with the birds. A dark spot on the right cuff of the shirt caught my attention. Lifting it closer to my eyes, they widened in slight terror to see a crawling mass of minute ticks. They had already begun to spread out over the shirt, and as I traced their path up my arm, it quickly became evident that I was covered in them. After I showed Claire, she scanned her clothing, and found they were crawling all over her too.
With bird already in hand, and another one waiting to be processed, we decided it would be hopeless to even attempt removing the hundreds of ticks that we could already feel climbing up our necks and under the sleeves of our shirts. So, we took all the measurements, feathers, and blood of both birds, trying not to notice the hundreds of pen point sized ticks. Simple.
I don’t even remember at what point this happened anymore, but amongst all of this, I was moving to close the net up after catching the two birds, and I noticed something black crawling across my shoulder. I look over to see a new Bullet Ant crawling toward my neck. I tried to swat it off a few times quickly before abandoning my shirt. Yanking it off as quickly as possible, I left it on the ground for a few minutes until I saw the ant crawl away. Claire and I smirked at each other, rolling our eyes as if to ask “What Next!”
We pack up the net to move on with no added problems, and despite all the bad jungle omens, we were in good spirits with hopes to catch a few more birds before lunch.
After waiting some twenty minutes at the next site, Claire and I begin to chuckle at how much we now resemble our smaller relatives of the jungle who spend so much time grooming. We sat there the whole time without sharing a word, just plucking ticks off of ourselves. Moving from site to site, we continued picking more and more ticks, but they seemed endless. By the time we stepped back out onto the main trail from our tick-infested trail from hell, we emerged with no more birds in the book, but at least the ticks were not obviously crawling all over us anymore.

Anxious to begin my afternoon, which now entailed removing the plenitude of parasites embedded in my body and clothing, I asked Claire if she was comfortable walking back alone, and then took off at a slow jog after putting the machete in my backpack.
It felt good to shuffle down the trail. Sweat quickly began to trickle down over my eyebrows as I found my running breath. After two especially thick cobwebs wrapped around my face, I knelt down and snagged one of the long stems of a cecropia leaf from the trail to wave in front of me as I ran. Hiking on these trails always reminds me of ‘mountain biking’ on the trails around Pinchot Park back in Pennsylvania with Silas when we were young. Amidst failing breaks, flat tires, and breaking bike seats, we always loathed being the unlucky one to go first down the trail in the early morning. Every hill, every corner, virtually all the trail offered an endless slew of cobwebs. We spit and wiped them from our faces as we sped down the trail, trying to avoid all the rocks and oncoming trees. Who knows how many of our countless wrecks were due to the distraction of disgusting cobwebs wet with morning dew. Despite this, we still headed out each morning on our bikes, until one day Silas threw his bike into the woods with a scream after a particularly unpleasant crash. The next morning we became fishermen, or boys who fished…
Fifteen minutes later I shed my wet boots and socks on the porch outside the comedor, and headed in for lunch. Small pools of sweat gathered where my forearms rested against the bench table as I gulped my food. We went around the table sharing stories and sightings from the morning, and I showed everyone a few of the ticks on the inside of my bicep while sharing the details of our interesting morning.
After a deliciously chilling shower, I cracked open an unpleasantly warm drink back in my cabin, lit a candle on the stand next to my bed, and sat down with some tweezers. Over the next forty minutes I counted eighty-two or eighty-three puffs of smoke exhale from the tip of the candle flame, each one of them a tick pulled from my body. Later, Frances graciously removed the remaining ticks from the areas I could not manage. We too shared a chuckle over how similar we had become to our distant relatives as she rummaged through the hair on my face and neck, plucking another one with a delightful, “Oh, there’s another one!”
After all this, cleaning the termite mess from my armoire seemed trivial. As the setting sun shined through the trees, I shook off my clothing, swept the termites and all the tracked-in sand out the door, off my porch, and walked to dinner.

A Good Morning

2008-07-13T19:20:00.003-06:00

7/13/08 - Happy Birthday Sara. I am thinking of you.

The early morning sun shot through the trees on the horizon as we ate a fine breakfast of pancakes with strawberry jam and queso, along with freshly cut papaya. A refreshing breeze wafted through the comedor, but the clear blue skies above the station spoke clearly of the ensuing heat. After breakfast we sat around, deciding what to do with our lazy Sunday morning. I opened my mac to check in on some e-mails before planning to head out into the woods.
Never underestimate the power of some good ole rock from the good days. Some CCR songs can always pick me up and inspire an active day any time, especially after a rough morning when some cold hair of the dog would be nice. Proud Mary had me rollin’ and ready to go look for some birds.
Striding across the soccer field to the trail some time before nine, the direct sunlight immediately coaxed a sticky sweat to form beneath my shirt. The shade of the forest was immediately relieving, but we continued to sweat as we hurried to catch up with the group of birders ahead of us. A few hundred yards up the trail, animals were crashing through the leaves, the tell tale sound of monkeys. We looked up to find some squirrel monkeys crossing the trail over our heads. They hurriedly worked through the understory in search of insects disturbed by the larger capuchins they follow through the jungle all day, every day. We snapped some shots as they moved away from us, but the dim light was not encouraging and we still had a group to catch up with.
Peeping noises came from the forest around us as we walked, and we eventually spotted one of the traps a few meters off of the trail where small wire mesh cages held young chickens. These were set here early in the morning by the researchers we were headed out to find. While they arrived just last night, they had already headed out onto the trail in hopes to quickly catch a new bird to this area that has been sited several times recently by some of us here at CICRA. It is a rare black-faced hawk, supposed to only reside in the North of Peru, far from here. Catching this bird to collect genetic information will shed light as to whether this species has a range much greater than originally suspected, whether it is perhaps a different morph of another species, or perhaps even a new species all together. It is most likely the same known species, and we are just now getting a better glimpse into this bird’s range as more knowledgeable people frequent this area. Nonetheless, it is very rare, and only one has been sited here.

Loops of fishing line glint in the tendrils of sun slicing through the dim forest as we pass. These loops will snare an unsuspecting hawk as it swoops down to land on the peep placed safely inside the wire mesh cage. We pass about ten of these traps along the trail until we find the researchers around the next bend, relaxing supine atop a poncho spread out across the trail. I smirk at first, but after my last week’s experience with various insects (story to come), I don’t blame them at all. I have even begun to carry a collapsible tripod seat with me over the last two weeks.
Diego, Frances, and I mill around for the next thirty minutes looking for birds until it is time to pass back by the traps to check for the hawk. We stop to look at some spider webs glinting in the sun around the trail, and especially remark over one orb web. This inverted hemisphere of densely woven silk seemed unlikely to catch anything other than attention as it conspicuously sparkled silvery white like a disco ball, yet several minutes later as we passed by again to go check the traps, the light had shifted and although it was only a foot off the trail at eye level, it had become invisible again. A few subtle notes of a flycatcher song drew our attention to the glowing leaves overhead. Diego found it quickly, but it took me ten minutes or more of searching until the petite gray and white bird flitted from its shadowy perch beneath the leaves, betraying its camouflage as it snatched an insect in mid air. This family of birds is well known for its astounding diversity, yet notorious for the fact that many species appear virtually identical to even the trained ornithological eyes crawling through these forests.
To accurately identify and learn field identification for these birds, one must not only know the possible plumages one may encounter in specific habitats, but one must also be able to pick out minute differences in their vocalizations. Take a minute, and say these next few ‘words’ out loud in your highest pitch possible.

“tchur’r’r’r’r’r’”

“tip-tchurrrrrrrrr”

“turp~ip~ip~ip ip ip ip”

If you think you could pick the differences in these songs out of the forest air, then perhaps you should fly to Peru tomorrow. And just in case you weren’t sure, the way each is written above is based on a complete ‘language’ birders use to learn these songs, and yes there is definitely a difference in the way the apostrophes, hyphens, and tildes are pronounced.
After thirty minutes had passed, we headed back down the trail, stopping momentarily to inspect each trap for a hawk or signs of a predator’s presence, but there were none. Since the researchers were planning on bringing the hawk back to the station for photographs should they have caught it, we decided to head back to the station. Along the way, I decided I wanted to stop at a spot where I have been seeing an especially bright manakin in hopes of photographing him. We dipped off onto a side trail we’ve been using to net a few of our antbirds, and sat in the foliage for a while, looking around. The first time I saw this bird we were waiting for a pair of our subject species to fly into our nets when suddenly the bright flaming orange head of this male caught my attention from where he stood, blazing in the sunlight. I nearly yelled as I watched each feather glisten a waxy brilliance through my binoculars. White emotionless eyes stared blankenly at me for a few minutes as the male stood motionlessly before me. Finally, after perhaps a minute, I looked away for a moment, and when I looked back only a bobbing Carrizo branch met my eyes.

We sat for perhaps ten minutes inside the dense foliage of the understory, perched just above a steep drop to a small densely covered spring below, but soon my interest in exploring overcame my distaste for sitting still. While the stream was only forty feet below, our want to see this bird kept us moving as slowly and quietly as we could until we were standing in the deep mud of the spring thirty minutes later.
We gazed around us, inspecting the clear water trickling over the deep in which mud we stood. A tall tree fern towered over us, casting a lacey drapery of long reaching fronds over the blue skies. We waited silently for a long time, shrugging to each other every few minutes, acknowledging the obvious. A deep sucking sound gasped from each hole as I moved another step forward every few minutes to keep the mud from climbing up over my sinking boots.
Finally a short murmur of a birdcall came from above. It was a single note with a melancholic minor pitch that rose at the end. I called back into the void until a dark green puff of feathers appeared above us flickering its wings excitedly as it searched the understory for the intruder. I wasn’t sure, but it appeared to be a female manakin, possibly the same species as the male we were in search of. She circled around us for ten minutes as I continued calling to keep its irritated attention while Frances tried to get a good glimpse of her through my binos. Then suddenly she disappeared, as most birds seem to do after a certain period of time. They seem to just lose interest or decide it must not be the intruder they thought.
We ascended the embankment on the other side of the stream, and came across a clearwing butterfly on our way back out to the sand path leading around our cabins. This individual stayed still enough for me to snap a picture before it popped off the leaf, and fluttered away like a red blotch of paint come to life.

Frances and I shared interest in lunch as we turned onto the sand path headed in the direction of the station. Another high pitch call coming from just off the side of the trail barely caught our attention. We looked over to see several titi monkeys looking back at us from some branches.

Frances mentioned how often she awakes from hot afternoon siestas to this group hanging in the trees outside her cabin. We watched them feed on some bamboo shoots for a few minutes as they hopped from tree to tree before running up into the top of a cecropia tree in search of fresh seeds.

This individual ate with comical exuberance. What a little gremlin. Look at those pirhanna teeth!

For the Love of Early Mornings

2008-07-04T14:14:00.004-06:00

With each change in my lifestyle, I tend to experience large changes in my sleeping habits, but a few things generally remain constant: I rarely sleep much, other people think my sleeping habits are rather crazy, and my internal clock appears to not run in accordance with a common schedule.

A sharp pain in my crotch shocked me to life. As I squeezed the epicenter of this quaking pain, hoping to kill whatever was biting this very important appendage, I reached over my head with my other hand, frantically fumbling through the dark for my headlamp. The pain subsided as my numb fingers felt for the switch of my headlamp, and I hoped I had killed the intruder. Even in a cabin covered in window screening, in a bed beneath a fine layer of mosquito netting, and beneath several sheets, insects are as pervasive as the oppressive the humidity here. They find their way to my body during the night, and while I am able to almost completely avoid itching all day long, I awake well before sunrise, scratching at these blemishes with abandon.
Lifting up my sheets, I slid my shorts down to inspect the damage, to see three reddish brown dots glinting in the light. When I was in Australia for a semester, we had a Tropical Disaster Game, in which students were given points for the intensity and frequency with which they encountered such tropical disasters as malaria, denge fever, box-jelly stings, ticks, leeches, stinging trees, snakes, etc. As I stared down my pants at these three ticks happily anchored in my ‘man-parts’ I was again reminded of winning this game several years ago. The amount of ticks and leeches that found their way to my genitals over a semester is what put me on the podium.
“You gotta be kidding me,” I half chuckled through an incredulous grimace as I sat up in my bed. I contemplated getting up for a few minutes to go get my tweezers at my desk in the lab until another shot of penetrating pain shocked me even more awake, and I decided to get up. After throwing on my damp field clothing, I slid my shoes on, shoved a rum bottle cap and candle into my pocket, and headed out of my cabin. Stumbling up the sandy path towards the lab at 230 am, mosquitoes and other insects buzzed before my headlamp, periodically landing on my face. Just after blowing one of these mosquitoes away from my lips, something flashed in front of my face and I felt a faint puff of air against my lips. Before I could realize what happened, again the bat flitted through the light, snatching another insect from the air, inches from my face.

I have been waking up early a lot lately. The amount of sleep I get here is rather ridiculous compared to what I am used to. While it is getting light around 430 or 5 back home, it gets light here around 6 all year, which means it also gets dark about the same time since we are in the tropics - the land of constantly unchanging sun. The lights cut out here when the electricity cuts out, which cuts out when Marco shuts off the generator, at about 930 in the evening. At this time, everyone usually filters off to his or her room to prepare for bed. Some read or write for a while under the light of their headlamp or candle, but most people are asleep very early.
The last two weeks I have been finding myself waking up around 230 am, after a solid 5-6 hours of sleep, which is what I have been used to for about 7 years now. I lay there for thirty minutes or so, waiting to fall back asleep, and suddenly wake back up at 430 to my alarm telling me it is time to get ready for work, and I feel completely groggy and confused. In college I had developed a method to get myself out of bed and out of my room as soon as I awoke in the morning any time after 5am, whether with my alarm or not. This worked rather well for me. My productivity in college went way up, I often woke up before my alarm, and I found myself rarely getting tired or grumpy during the days. So, I have decided to embrace this lifestyle again while I am here in the Peru, even if it means getting up at 230am. I figured what better morning to resume this practice than when I woke up to the shocking pain of three insects sinking into the softest flesh on my body.
Within the grasp of my tweezers, all of the ticks came out completely painlessly in less than a minute. I then dug a fingernail into each one, cutting them in half, and flicked their pieces into the darkness around me. I find it odd that ticks down here sincerely hurt when they bite, while most of their North American counterparts can sink well into our flesh without detection for days.

Down in the comedor, I found some matches in the kitchen next to the gas stove, lit a match, and held it to the bottom of my candle momentarily, then pressed it to the inside of the rum cap until it held fast. My nose wrinkled involuntarily and I exhaled sharply as a tendril of sulphury smoke invaded my nostrils. As I sat and read, little explosions puffed from the flame. Mosquitoes fell onto the table next to the candle, stiff legs in the air, no wings left; all of them a minute Icarus in their own right, having flown too close to the sun illuminating the paper and pen before me.

Fifty-Cent Piece Dreams, A Day at CICRA, II

2008-06-29T16:03:00.005-06:00

photo by: Will Minehart

Although the weather has been quite variable since arriving here, ranging from forty degrees one morning, then eighty-five the next, our clothes are usually damp with sweat about ten minutes after taking off for our morning’s work as the sun is just breaking the horizon. We usually hike a few kilometers each morning, sometimes as much as ten, as we move from site to site up the trail, stopping at the yellow flags we have placed on small saplings, denoting the presence of another antbird’s territory.
We move through the forest playing these birds’ songs, waiting for them to come flying in to defend their territory. They flit through the understory, shaking their wings and calling back in defense of their home, but little do they know we are only crying wolf, at least today.
In the coming days, the antbirds hear the phantom intruder again, and usually fly in with equal vigor to dispatch the threat. As they dart around in search of the intruder, an invisible hand sweeps out from the void, and suddenly they are hanging, still able to move and flop around in the air they were just flying through a minute earlier, but very few escape.
Watching from afar, we see the net jump, and a black ball of netting forms where the bird struggles in vain. We turn off the speakers singing the song of the phantom intruder, and move in to collect the bird from the net. This usually takes a minute, but sometimes it can take longer, depending on a multitude of ways a bird can rarely become severely tangled. Usually removing a bird entails holding onto both feet after you have untangled the thin netting from its claws, then simply backing the bird out of the net as you remove the loops of netting that have slid over the two wings first and then finally the head. In perfect instances like this, you are left with a bird sitting indignantly atop your fingers as you hold its legs.
However, if nets are not set to the appropriate tension, there are sticks pushing against them for the birds to grab hold of, or it gets tangles around the bird’s tongue, which is forked in the back of their throat, the results for the bird are potentially grim. To an amateur, a snared bird looks hopelessly entangled, and death seems immanent short of cutting the bird free. In reality, removing the bird is relatively simple, but I do recall one time during a hot day in Pennsylvania when a tiny wren had been overlooked in one of our nets where it was tangled on the ground. In the time it took me to find the exhausted bird, it had become extremely tangled, and it had been laying in the direct sunlight.
I struggled for some time, talking to the bird to calm my racing heart. Carefully rolling the bird around in my hands as I searched for the easiest place to begin, I thought of the family of wrens I watched grow up in a bird-box in my neighbor’s lawn one summer. At that moment, holding that bird in my sweating hands, I questioned the rationale of such invasive research practices. Stopping several times, I allowed the bird to hang in the net again as I took a few breathes and looked around me in exasperation as if some help might materialize from the briars surrounding us.
I eventually unraveled the hundreds of strings imprisoning the bird, and an hour later I set the wren in the shade of a raspberry bush. I came back thirty minutes later to find it still sitting there, but as I leaned in for a better look, it flitted away through the brush. Every time I take hold of a bird’s legs as it hangs in the net, I remind myself to remain calm so as to minimize any possibility of worsening this tenuous situation.
These mist-nets are amazing contraptions, and are ironically of very similar texture and density as those lunch ladies or even you may have worn if you have ever worked in the food industry. When hung properly they are virtually indistinguishable in the early morning light. We always chuckle on the trail when one of us gets caught or literally walks right into the net moments after setting it up. We then know we have set a good net, and despite being completely black, you have to focus hard to discern it from the rest of the forest.

photo by: Frances Buerkens

National Geographic and other such organizations have done an amazing job of glorifying the sexiest parts of science and field research, but as many people say, it is really far from glamorous or exciting. Amidst days that can easily feel downright lethargic and unrewarding, work that is initially illuminated with inspiration can easily become obscured within the shadows of this dark and humid rainforest.
The nature of this work makes it very difficult to aptly describe. It would be easy to romanticize this research, only describing the most attractive parts of the position, but it would shed no light on the basic reasons why there are people out here doing this in the first place.
Even the actual act of recording data is so anally structured that you are often too stressed and focused on collecting data in the correct way that you fail to even take enjoyment in the fact that you are holding a living creature in your hand. When else do we ever come into direct contact with a living wild animal?

Holding a bird, I can barely feel its almost nonexistent papery weight. Just flip a fifty-cent piece in the air. This is all that these creatures weigh. The beating of their heart sends a slight vibration through my hand. Their head follows my fingers, snapping back in defense the moment I put them within reach. You can feel the texture of each feather as softly as a whisper in your ear, and you can see how the pattern on each contributes perfectly to the whole.

photo by: Will Minehart

This is the reason I began this work. So long ago I sat in my yard, staring at robins. I never realized then, as they hopped around in the lush summer grass, plucking long worms from nowhere that they would never be interested in the seed placed conspicuously beneath the box sitting in the middle of the yard that was propped up by a stick with a string tied to it. Why I spent so many hours staring out from behind the shed in my yard, holding onto the other end of that string in vain still makes no more sense to me than the subconscious driving attraction I feel in the midst of a beautiful woman. It is never enough to simply see when attraction is concerned. Some internal force yearns for more, driving me to touch, to reach out and affirm the physical existence of such beauty as though to only see without touch can still leave its existence in question. A feather found shining in the light dappling the trail brings out the voyeuristic side in many of us. I know many who find it impossible to pass by a fallen feather without picking it up. Some of us hide them in books, removing them from time to time to admire their brilliant color and to feel their softness against our cheeks. Others adorn their cars or rooms with such ornaments of refuse, and despite their timely fading in the sun, they still shiver in the wind when the windows are down and the music loud.

However, these are not the thoughts that cross my mind as I hold calipers up to the beak of these petite kites with hearts. I do not feel any realization of my ultimate attraction as I hold a capillary tube to the vein of this tiny bird to collect a sample of its meager blood supply as it lies helplessly in my sweaty hands.
I sometimes question, rather every time we catch a bird, the stress I perceive us imparting on it forces me to question this work. But as I see a sheepish smile spread over one of the other researchers I am working with as he holds up one individual to closer inspect this species plumage patterns, I see a glimmer of passion in his eyes that reminds me what it felt like to finally hold a live bird after so many years of senseless attraction and even obsession with this distant beauty.
In such passion there is a pure love present that is both selfish and benevolent. For every time I look into the eyes of a bird in my hands I see a smile spread across the face of that three year old I used to be, hiding behind that shed in the yard I grew up in, hoping that the string in my hand attached to the trap thirty feet away would eventually turn into the reality of a bird in my hands. However, in those eyes I also see the frail reminder of the responsibility I feel within my chest to protect the world that makes it possible to feel the reality of this little feathered dream.
So, when people ask me to describe what I do on a daily basis, especially now when I am so far from home in the Amazon, I find it hard to answer them clearly. I am going out into the jungle every day, finding where specific birds are located, catching them, putting little identification bands on their legs, and then extracting all the data I can from each bird just shy of taking its life. This is all in the name of science, and in this particular project it is to hopefully gain more insight about exactly how one single species can diverge into many, even though they may live a kilometer or only a couple hundred meters away from each other.
I hate snagging a bird out of the air, smashing its supreme grace with an invisible net, and I doubt anyone doing this work enjoys extracting the integrity from a bird as it lies supine in their hand, bleeding slightly from a vein in their elbow so that we can later compare its DNA to their relatives'.
Nonetheless, at the moment this is one of the very few methods we have to gain the vital knowledge necessary to testify to the intrinsic value and need for conservation that most people doing this work feel moved to be a part of. For me, it is the only way I have found possible to exact some societal value to my life while still achieving the dreams of that kid who still stares with hope from the depths of my memory.

photo by: Will Minehart

Lobos, Cochas, and Hoatzins...

2008-06-24T14:37:00.006-06:00

Sunday greeted us with clouds and a break from the oppressive heat and humidity. There are still many places I have yet to visit with potentially great rewards in the local area, and on Sunday we had plans to visit one of these places. So, after a lazy morning, and an equally lazy lunch, people began to share plans for their day, and luckily there were a few people up for some exploring. So, Frances, a newly arrived student from the States, Eric, a Peruvian who is here assisting on the antbird project, and I decided to take a walk to Cocha Lobo to see what luck the change in weather might bring us.

Cocha is the word for lake, but a specific type of lake known in English as an oxbow lake. These form usually over very long periods of time in response to rather complex hydrodynamics. Once a river reaches a level plain, it is free to create the beautiful serpentine shape many of us may have recognized during flights around the world. Rivers pick up sediment from riverbanks in the fastest areas of the river, which happen to be on the outside of a river bend where the water is flowing the fastest. The river then deposits sediment in the slower portions of the river, which happens to be on the inside of river bends. Through this action, rivers are always demolishing and rebuilding the land it flows through. Over time, this process brings the two extreme ends of a river bend closer and closer to each other until they are finally close enough for the water to push through the thin wall of land separating them. When the water finally breaches, it creates a straighter course for the water to flow through, leaving the large bend in the river to become an oxbow lake, or cocha.
Lobo is the local word for wolf. Yes, there are wolves in the cocha that we are headed to today, but they are lobos del rio, or river wolves. The river wolf is actually an otter, and here in Amazonia hides the largest otter in the world, which can often grow up to the length of an average adult human. While this cocha was named after this giant otter, nobody has seen the family known to have live there for some time now, and people have been beginning to worry if they have left the cocha.

It was a short hike to the cocha, perhaps two kilometers. We stopped along the way to enjoy climbing some of the large rainforest trees with huge buttresses and vines, and stopped at several spots to strain our necks in search for some of the beautiful forest canopy birds flitting through the treetops.

photo by: Frances Buerkens

There were two wooden canoes at the entrance to the cocha. We all climbed in one, and pushed off. Gliding softly in silence into the center of the lake we looked around, wondering where to head first. Across the water a large kingfisher stood atop a tree over the water, scanning for unwary fish near the surface. The water seemed to be a mix between your common muddy brown, and an unpalatable green like split pea soup.

photo by: Frances Buerkens

After gazing around us in wonder for a moment, we promptly chose a direction with little reason, and headed off. A larger bird flitted to a perch under the canopy, flashing some bright red as it landed. Through my binos I could make out it was the bright red belly I had seen. This bird had a long tale, an emerald colored back and head, and surprisingly drab, grey wings. I couldn’t see the bird completely clearly due to the rock of the canoe, but this was enough to tell me it was one of the species of trogons that are somewhat common to those searching for them in these forests.
A moment later a rustle in the bushes far ahead accompanied with an odd cough-like hissing sound broke the silence of the lake. We could see bright reddish-brown feathers slapping through the brush overhanging the cocha, and we knew we had found a group of perhaps one of the oddest animals one can find in the Amazon, the hoatzin. This prehistoric looking bird is the size of a turkey. Flying from perch to perch, these large birds are just as clumsy any large bird can be, but they apparently don’t notice. They crash through dense foliage, making their way up to a point in the forest they can easily fly from in case of emergency. Keeping an eye on us, they peer out from behind larger clumps of foliage as if there is a chance they have made their way to safety void of detection. I can’t help but giggle at their cartoon-like character, reminding me of the foolishly aloof loonytoon vultures I watched growing up.
We watch one group for some time, waiting to take a picture, when finally one seems to have lost its inhibition and flies right down in front of us in plane view, perching uneasily atop a sparsely vegetated cecropia tree. It flaps its wings to maintain balance until the tree finally ceases to sway beneath its weight. Frances snaps some pictures quickly, unsure of how long the bird will remain, while I smile through my binoculars. Their bright red eyes remind me of an albino pet rabbit. As if the red eyes didn’t stand out enough, they have bright blue skin surrounding their eyes, and a sparsely spiked orange mo-hawk streaking over the crest of their head. We sit and stare at the bird for a few minutes as it does the same, constantly cocking its neck back and forth, craning it as far as possible as if to get a better view of us as well.

photo by: Frances Buerkens

The hoatzins turned out to be by far the most abundant animal at the cocha. Every hundred feet we advanced it seemed a new group of them exploded haphazardly from the brush near the water, frantically trying to get up higher to safety, all the while pausing from time to time to gaze at us cryptically as if we couldn’t see them. This is by far the most awkward animal I have ever seen. The locals say they taste terrible, and would be hard pressed to eat them even if they hadn’t eaten for some time. These birds eat leaves, a very uncommon practice in the bird world, and they have claw-like hooks protruding from their elbows at birth, a remnant of their reptilian lineage.

After making it to one grass filled end of the cocha, we turned around and headed back the other direction. We worked along the banks slowly and quietly, searching for hiding animals along the way. As we rounded one corner I traced streaks of lime green algae that reminded me of the way pollen coats the lakes in spring back in the states. I suddenly noticed the streaks were moving, and saw there was a wake extending from around the corner. Just as I realized there must be something moving in the water ahead, brown dots popped up, breaking the horizon of placid water.
The family of giant otters appeared suddenly, swirling, spinning, and rolling over each other, completely unaware of our presence. We sat motionlessly until two of them spotted us, and uttered a series of grunt like barks as they turned and swam in our direction. Bobbing up and down as they approached for a better view, they could easily lift their necks almost two feet out of the water while still swimming forwards.

photo by: Frances Buerkens

“Oh my God, how big are these things,” questions Frances as she finally gets a clear view of them bobbing towards us.
“A little less than two meters supposedly,” I uttered, trying not to make to much sound or movement.
Frances began snapping photos of them, and finally they had seen all they needed to when they were about 100 feet away. She later shared with us that due to her vision, the white streaks on the otters’ necks looked to be wide open mouths, causing some question about not only the size of these animals, but subsequently her safety as well.
What we presumed to be the young behind the adults had been playing in the water with each other while the parents came to inspect the aberration in their lake. As soon as the parents returned the group, they swam past the youngsters, who promptly followed. It was then apparent they were headed in the opposite direction, most likely back to their sheltered campsite along the lakeshore under some thick cover.
We followed as quickly as we could in the canoe, but we hadn’t quite perfected the teamwork of paddling the canoe in a straight line, let alone while in pursuit of creatures perfectly adapted to swimming quickly in water. As we rounded the next corner, they dipped under some overhanging foliage, leaving only several wakes spreading across the lake. We looked at each other with grins – a family of six lobos!
Lobos are apparently quite endangered, and while it is known that they exist in this area of the quite remote Peruvian Amazon, scientists are rather unsure how healthy their populations are. The only places they are known to be doing well are in the northern regions of the Amazonian Guianas. One can guess their plight – the usual impacts due to presence of man: hunting, trapping for furs, and loss of habitat due to deforestation.
In less than one month I have been so fortunate to see so much here already: Many species of monkeys up close, an 8 meter long monster anaconda up close, a rare black cayman 3 meters long basking along the riverbank, many birds I have dreamed about seeing for years and years, and now a very rare glimpse of a family of lobos playing in the middle of a cocha.

Waking Up - A Day at CICRA, I

2008-06-21T09:12:00.002-06:00

I squinted my eyes into the bright yellow light flooding my vision, obscuring any thoughts. I couldn’t tell where I was or if I was awake, and I couldn’t see very well. It wasn’t until I heard the insects outside, and felt my mosquito net against my head that I realized I was still in the in my cabin back in the jungle behind the station.
Still utterly confused why bright yellow light was shooting through the darkness into my cabin, I sat up and I looked around trying to figure out what direction the light was coming from. An early morning breeze filtered in through the screens, cooling my sweaty back. I ducked under my mosquito net, and took the two steps across my cabin to get dressed. My pants felt sticky and damp still with yesterday’s sweat. Drying doesn’t really happen, so I am getting used to this grimy feeling I wash away once a week or so from this pair of pants. Wearing clothing here is very much a ration system. Bringing a piece of clothing out of the small, slightly mildewed armoire means it will not be clean again until it is washed by hand on a lucky day of sunshine.
I am enveloped in darkness again as soon as I step outside, the blazing yellow light still illuminating my cabin. My back has already begun sweating again as I follow the white circle my headlamp casts on the sand path before me. Blue and red spider eyes reflect every other step. I prefer to walk in the dark, for it really isn’t that dark, but I have been asked several times now to use a headlamp by various people here. Passing from the forest into the wide open soccer field/helipad, I momentarily gaze into a hole in the side of the trail where I was told the poisonous Fer-de-Lance snake is known to live, but I quickly get distracted by the Common Pauraque shining red up the path. If I shine the light on this ground dwelling nocturnal nightjar early enough, I can walk quietly to within three feet of some of them before they pop off the ground, and silently swim through the heavy early morning air.
As I approach the series of buildings making up the bulk of the CICRA station I see no lights on at all, but then see a glow from behind the lab building and realize that it was the full moon low on the horizon that was blasting my sleepy eyes a few minutes ago. I take off at a run to get my camera at my desk in the lab, excited to get some good shots of the moon shining down over the river and the surrounding jungle as the twilight is fading blue across the rarely luminous night.
A minute later I am heading out of the lab, past some cabins towards the overlook of the river to the West. I step off of the trail as I pass the last few cabins so as not to wake everyone with abrupt raucous of brazil nut husks crunching beneath my shoes. The bright glow from behind the last cabin urges my pace faster, and I emerge to the overlook to see a huge moonlit cloud sweeping across the moon. Only one cloud in the whole sky, and it is a huge, high level, slow moving, and thick cirrus cloud. My shoulders drop a bit, but I still take the time to practice a few cloud shots.

Five minutes later, twilight has chased away the night, and the day grows brighter to my back. I take off my shoes, laying the contents of my pockets and my hoodie on top of them, and wriggle my toes into the damp, sandy soil. Touching my toes for a few minutes, I sway back and forth, waking up my back. Lifting my chin and chest with my breath, I rise, and arch my chest to the sky, reaching for the new day. I momentarily loose equilibrium, and stepping forward to regain my balance, I grin uneasily as I look over the edge of the drop to the red clay riverbank far below. Taking a step back, I try this motion again a little slower. My chest cracks where my ribs meet, much like most people crack their backs, and I feel my chest now open to the sky. Rotating my arms in circular motions, reaching up to the sky, then bringing my hands to a prayer position at my chest, I imagine myself drawing the new day inside, scooping refreshing light into my body. Moving through some sun salutations and warrior poses, my heart also wakes up. I can feel my pulse in my ears as I move through the poses, in my wrists during down-dog, and moving through my hips as I settle deeply into the warrior poses. The heat returns to my body, and I no longer feel the need to for the hoodie lying next to me. As I move through these poses, I hear some rustling in the bushes in front of me. A few minutes later a family of Titi Monkeys materialize from the shadows. They only glance at me before moving out into a tree directly in front of me to bask in the sun and eat some unripe green fruit.

Finishing standing up with my knees slightly bent, my breathing slowly relaxes, as does my gaze out over this place, the jungle, la selva, Peru, the Amazon! I watch the red river ripple around the bend just upstream from the station, following its course right up next to some eddies, where the water swirls, and turns back upstream for a short while. Muddy sandbars melt into the water. Where the water licks the mud the softest, animals tracks help create the distinction of these two domains.
I scan each side of the river up and downstream in hopes of catching sight of a cayman skulking beneath the morning mist, but I have yet to see one this time of day. At this distance, I have no way of telling what the tracks belong to, but the possibility of sighting a jaguar, peccary, tapir, or a cayman is alluring enough to stand for some time watching for any movements on the riverbanks. However, my eyes are continually drawn into the swirling currents of the river’s minute whirlpools, dancing and spinning like a butterfly in the early morning sun.

The new sun quickly warms the air, pushing quiet breezes into the west. Emergent trees across the river peaking out from the whole of the jungle canopy sway back and forth. I trace the advancement of the breeze across the land as trees further and further begin to sway to life. A blanket of jungle extends out to the horizon where it meets another blanket of clouds. Behind those clouds rise the Andes. On the clearest mornings they shoot up into the sky, capped in the vast glaciers that can easily be taken for clouds at such a distance. My first morning here, the sunrise erupted upon the mountaintops in bright rosy hues. A wall of clouds resides at the foot of the mountains where the cloud forests are licked in mist, accentuating the vast heights of these behemoths. I figured that since I was being given such an amazing view on my first morning here, it would probably happen again. Well, it is my third week here, and the mountains haven’t been so clearly visible since.
I watch flocks of macaws and many other different types of parrots scatter through the sky in squawking and shrieking flocks of bright greens, yellows, blues, and reds, smirking momentarily at how ridiculous the macaws’ shrieks sound in juxtaposition to the beautiful plumage they adorn. Some are heading across the river to get an early check up on some fruit trees, others may be headed to one of the many local collpas, or clay-licks, which are important areas where jungle animals eat clay to obtain vital minerals.
The smell of garlic and rice finally filters to where I am, telling me it is time for breakfast. Some mornings we have lentils and garlic rice, other mornings we have scrambled eggs with some veggies and the most delicious Andean cheese, simply called queso here. The meals are pretty good, always including rice in each meal, and always heartily filling.

I Never Would Have Thought...

2008-06-08T19:53:00.004-06:00

“We’re going to Pozo Don Pedro, wanna come,” asked Susan and Lindsey as they approached Claire and I on the trail. It was almost 10am, and it was getting rather hot. All of my clothing was more wet than dry, and we were headed back to the station anyways.

“You can go if you want to,” said Claire, shrugging her shoulders after the girls asked her to come as well.

“Nah, come on,” I replied, and we all plodded down the trail to the palm swamp, in search of some interesting animals.

A few kilometers ahead, we descended eroding mud steps a couple hundred feet down to a boardwalk that took us to the pond, or pozo. We all hopped into the catamaran, which was two wooden canoes linked together by a wooden platform atop them. We pushed off with wooden, spade tipped paddles that reminded me of a serpent head, and glided into the middle of the murky, red pond.

I looked around at the towering palms. I had never heard of a palm swamp before, now I was floating in the middle of one. Palms stood perhaps almost one hundred feet above us, bright brown fronds heavy with golf ball-sized fruit leaned out from the trees like fishing rods, periodically dropping fruit into the pond like bombs.

We pushed into the first island of grass and stood up, searching around for movement, anything. The grass would move every few minutes, but we couldn’t see much. Floating past a leaning palm a few minutes later, we watched small, mouse-sized bats fly out from the underside of the crooked tree. Some swirled around us while others disappeared directly into the swamp forest, but they were all gone in seconds one way or another.

Floating past the palm, we approached a prominent finger of grass protruding out into the pond, and Lindsey stood up, looking around, and sat back down surprised not to have seen anything interesting. We sat around for a few minutes discussing some orchids that grew in the pond, and shared some knowledge of them. There were some interesting dragonflies and spiders around, so we took some pictures of them as we talked. The sky was bright blue above us, but the waxing sun was feeling rather oppressive, making me miss my hat in my cabin.

As we pushed off to inspect a few more islands of grass, something shiny caught my eye. I stood up, and saw something definitely shiny and rather large in the grass. I stepped up onto the deck of the hobey-cat, and there it was, clear as day coiled amongst the swamp grass.

Its scales glistened like thousands of huge fingernails in the sun, the texture of each individual one easily noticeable. At it’s thickest point it was about 18” in diameter, but we couldn’t see its head.

“I’d say its about 4 meters,” said Lindsey as she knodded her head, keeping her eyes on the large serpent.

Twelve feet, twelve feet…I was standing less than ten feet from an Anaconda, that was over twelve feet long.

We jockeyed for the best photo spots on the deck of the boat until finally someone saw its head, shining eyes staring motionlessly from behind a sapling.

Its head was bigger than my dog’s head back home, which I think to be pretty big. I couldn’t get over it. We stood there next to the thing for maybe 20 minutes taking pictures of it, seeing if it would move, until finally for us to move on. We actually found another Anaconda within a foot of the boat at a later point. Lindsey spotted it as it was moving away from us through the swamp grass, but this was a small one, its girth a little less than my thigh, most likely about 3 meters long.

Back at the station for lunch, we questioned two of the locals about the size of the Anaconda, showing them how big the snake was, using a hugging motion with our arms, something usually reserved for showing tree girth until I came here.

“Eight meters,” replied Antonio solidly with some quinoa hanging from his lower lip, his brow furrowing in apparent assurance, making a large scar on his forehead stand out from his skin.

“What, no! Eight meters you think?” replied Lindsey in disbelief.

“Yes, of course, eight meters,” he repeated, getting up to walk over to Angel (pronounced an-hell).

Antonio and Angel exchanged a few sentences, Angel asking him to show him the girth of the serpent. Antonio showed the common hugging gesture indicating the massive girth of the snake, and Angel immediately replied, “eight meters.”

My jaw dropped. I was standing about three meters from a snake whose girth was bigger than my waist or chest, and was possibly over 24 feet long. It was apparent this snake had eaten recently enough from its behavior and girth for this distance to not be an immediate threat to us, but at such a distance, imagining the sheer strength of that body wrapping around me and its rough scales biting into my skin seemed quite visceral.

Back in April I sat on the bed of Kevin’s truck sipping a beer with Silas in Central Pennsylvania, close to Penn’s Creek. It was then they made me realize I may be seeing Anacondas and Caymans in the Amazon. I was so focused on finally living my dream of life in the jungle with only visions of so many of the most amazing birds in the world that I had never remembered what everyone else thought of when the word Amazon, or jungle was mentioned. Within hours of getting on the boat that took us the final leg of the journey to the research station, CICRA, Claire spotted a large, 3 meter quite rare Black Cayman, which quickly submerged into the river,. Now, only my third day at CICRA, I have seen two Anacondas within a few feet of me in a pond where four such serpents are known to live. Sitting on the bed of that truck, sipping that beer as we swatted relentless blackflies in the early spring, I never would have thought…

Puerto Maldonado

2008-06-07T10:56:00.000-06:00

6/6/08
Today has been quit the day. It started rather early, much earlier than I would have preferred, but the night had other plans. Before going to bed last night I walked around town to experience the nightlife of Puerto Maldonado a little bit. I can’t explain every too well, because I still can’t write in Spanish that much, but here is a basic, and potentially very ethnocentric view of Puerto Maldonado.
I saw three cars the whole time we were in Puerto, but perhaps a few thousand motorbikes, and many, many took-took’s, which are the equivalent of taxi’s here. They are motor bikes with a two wheel axle and seat attached to the back with a canopy overhead to shield you from dust, rain, flying rocks, etc. Maybe 25% of the roads here are paved, and I use that term very loosely. There are a few traffic lights, and I was surprised to see they are respected. The driving down here is very, very crazy, and it makes a lot more sense. It seems like while Peruvians are on their feet, they are the most laid back people I have met, but when they are driving, for some reason getting to the destination as quickly as possible seems to be a goal that one’s life depends on. Stop signs are more like precautionary signs letting you know there are going to be people ahead. Everybody just works through an intersection as they can, no matter how close you come to each other. Babies sleep, open mouthed and arms swinging as they bounce along the dirt roads, sandwiched between the driver and their mother on the back of the bike. Most of the buildings are composed of wood, but there are also plenty in the market area that are more secure with cinder block, and rolling, locking doors. There is a grand market in the center of the town where you can buy almost anything you need from food, to clothing, to hardware. There are wooden structures with corrugated roofing or tarps. There are gutters in the center of each walking aisle where run has gouged away at the dirt. There are tons of fruits, breads, and grains, veggies, etc. I think it is encouraged to barter for your goods here, but the difference someone is willing to go down on something is so miniscule that it isn’t work it unless you are buying something large and expensive. The people are like in any town, except I can’t understand most of them. Some are nice and don’t care if you can’t understand them. They talk fast no matter how nicely you ask them to speak slowly and repeat themselves. Then there are others who naturally appreciate someone who is courteous and calm, and willing to learn their language. They speak slowly and simply, repeating themselves ad nauseum for my sake. I love these people. I walk away after talking to these people feeling encouraged and benevolent towards humans again.
So, after taking one last stroll around the market, I heard some loud music, and followed it to the center of the market, where there was a large opening, and people gathered all around. There were keyboards being played, people singing and clapping, dancing, etc. Then I heard the word Jesus in Spanish, along with some other words commonly accompanied when Catholicism is involved, and I realized I had stumbled into a circle of people holding mass right in the middle of market, singing gospels about the great lord Jesus Christ…I hung around and bobbed to the music, observed the crowd for a few minutes, then walked away. There were some who were completely enthralled by the music with a huge smile on their face, hands in the air, while others stood in the back alone, void of facial expression or movements except clapping their hands idly to the beat. It was pleasant.
On the way back to the hotel, I stopped to get a Gelato, and spoke to another very kind woman who was interested in why I was walking around Puerto by myself late at night. I explained for the third time that night that I was going to the jungle for work tomorrow, and that I was a researching, researching the birds in the jungle with a University. Most people here in Puerto smile and nod with a pensive look on their face, and I feel some pleasure in this, hoping there is some great rift between someone coming to their land for tourism, and for work. Their pensive smiles and nods tell me they appreciate this more, but who knows…
I enjoyed another very large Peruvian beer in the restaurant attached to our hotel, wrote for a while before going to bed. I fell asleep very quickly, but found myself lying wide-awake around 3am. I knew I shouldn’t have gone to bed at 1030pm. I dozed in and out of sleep, but it was useless. There were many noises outside to keep me from regaining slumber. First, a noisy group of people in the lobby, then an obnoxiously loud TV in someone’s room accompanied by a phone ringing in the open air office 20 feet away with people on the other end most likely irate over the amount of noise. Once this stopped then there were people walking past my door, some of them with lights that were flashing in through my window. In my delirium I began to worry they were people looking for rooms to attempt to enter and rob. I had a knife next to my head. I laid there, analyzing the minutia of sounds outside, growing more paranoid by the minute. It was now 430am. I was ready to get up, and figured I could better use my time writing, but I didn’t.
As the footsteps faded, a new sound emerged from the night, which I will refer to as Peruvian Water Torture. This is the sound made when the heavy mist that descends in the early morning hours condenses on the corrugated roofs and walls of buildings, eventually creating a constant but completely irregular drip. The drops fall on the tiled walkways, wire-mesh ceilings, other corrugated plastic roofs, tympanic leaves of all sizes, and who knows what else. I enjoyed this sound for about two minutes, extolling the vast amount of different tones a myriad of rain drops could make before realizing there was no rhythm of consistency to it, which left no way to fall asleep to it. Just as I would feel I was drifting off, a large dead bug would fall, dropping a staccato, “OH NO YOU DON’T,” and I was awake again. This continued menacingly until eventually the mist subdued, and I fell asleep until there was light outside around 6am.
---
Once it was light, that meant breakfast was on, finally giving me a good enough reason to just let go of the failed night’s rest. There was fruit and little fried roll things filled with cheese and guacamole, fresh bread with rich yellow butter, and delicious juice. I ate until I realized I ate too much again, snagged two bananas for the boat, and went back to my room to pack.
An hour later Claire and I were on the road, leaving Puerto in a small car, whose shocks we bottomed out with our luggage. As we left the town of Puerto, I realized why all the taxi drivers had windshields that made even the worst winter windshield in the States look wonderful. The roads connecting towns down here are mainly dirt with cobble, which bounces very well as cars run over it. After realizing this I noticed rocks flying through the air as every car passed us, and became rather paranoid of getting hit in the face, deciding to cover my face as every other car passed after this. Speed bumps down here are serious too. There is no way any vehicle at all can pass one without coming to an almost complete stop. They are about as tall as they can get without bottoming out most normal size sedans as they pass over. Weighed down by all the gringos’ shit, we bottomed out every time.
An hour later, we arrived to the town of Labrinta, which reminded me perfectly of Nueva Vida, in Nicaragua. I don’t recall any paved roads in this very small town, but there may have been some. We were dropped off at the port, and as we unloaded our stuff, there were some guys sitting in a pavilion next to us, obviously gawking at the spectacle of these clean gringos covered almost completely from the sun, with all this luggage pouring out of the car.
We stood there awkwardly for a few minutes until other people began arriving. We promptly began loading the boats, which was a challenging task in itself. The bank of the river had mud steps pounded into it, but they were just that, soft mud. We managed to load the boat with no one falling, and all was well. The bank was composed of old burlap rice sacks that has been filled with dirt and stacked to make a levee of sorts to minimize erosion along the heaviest used parts of the river. They worked, but the river still bit into the town where there were no trees to hold the fine, alluvial soil together. Houses hung over the edges of the banks, and were apparently abandoned with the time had come to let the river claim them.
We pushed off an hour or so after boarding, with one open seat in the front next to me. A minute later Labrinta disappeared around the river bend, and I smiled as the wind washed clean, fresh smelling river air into my nostrils, a blessing after four days in Lima.

Around the Hotel

2008-06-04T12:54:00.002-06:00

I have been spending a ton of time around the hotel. It is a nice respite from everything happening in the streets of Lima. I can only handle so much at once, since every time I have to talk to someone it is stressful, yet funny too!

Today I had more of what I consider to be a European lunch than a Peruvian. I was very surprised to see an old favorite beer sitting in a wicker basket in the market today. The beer is a wonderful one that I enjoyed during a time I travelled to visit Joelle in Germany, and man was it a megaplop when I opened that sucker! The bright yellow cheese in the sandwich was very rich and delicious, and I decided it was time for some chocolate.

Other than that, here is a look at the momma dove I hear every morning just as it is getting light out, and her chick, which just fell out of the nest yesterday, but seems to be ready for the venture. He is still relaxing outside at the same place.

Necesito una pistolera por favor!

2008-06-04T12:15:00.003-06:00

Well, the last couple days have been composed of hours of sedentary waiting and writing, accentuated by moments of intense and utter confusion. Claire and I have been taxi'ing all over Lima, trying to meet with people who are helping us procure our research permits from the government, while trying to round up the last minute supplies we need for the next four months in the jungle. These are menial tasks, which back home would take perhaps twenty minutes to an hour in most cases, but things run differently here. Things don't get done as quickly, and Claire and I are rather hilariously stumbling through spanish conversations that are more hand and body gestures than actual spanish conversation. However, every few minutes we both are able to muster up a good sentence here or understand a whole sentence that someone says back to us.

Buying things: It isn't as forward as buying things back home. Once you get someone to actually understand what you are looking for, they usually don't have it, so they tell you to go somewhere else, which we don't understand until they start pointing out the door. They then give us directions, a whole other test in itself. Once we get to the new store, we have a better idea of what to say, and things generally run more smoothly. Once we find what we need, our specifications are usually much more acute than what most people need. For example: I needed a transformer to allow me to plug my chargers into the outlets here since the electricity would fry my goods. So, once we got to the third electronics store, we found one, but it took about 10 minutes to make sure the person thought this one transformer would work for all of my belongings. I was skeptical, so I figured I would plug my least necessary amenity into the wall first, my shaver. That quickly ended with me realizing I now needed an adapter so the freaking plug from my razor could plug into my transformer. So, that required a whole other trip in which Claire was also looking for a very specific speaker cable with two male ends of different, but very specific sizes. At our second store, I procured the plug I needed, only after slightly offending the lady who was helping me because apparently I had to buy two of them at once, and couldn't buy one. I figured it was a ploy to make more money, and continually repeated I only needed one (this was after a long conversation in which I repeated myself three times, obviously not saying the right things, to get the lady to understand what I needed). The lady became frustrated and said something a little quieter under her breath that could have been something mean, but I am giving her the benefit of the doubt, thinking she may have only said, "Well we only sell them in packs of two sir."

So, then (no it's not over) she gave me a ticket, which by then I was becoming familiar with. I finally understood I had to take that ticket to another person and pay for the item, then go to another person and actually receive the damned item. I took the ticket to a door in the back, and uttered something, but realized there were no cash registers as the lady stared at me with nothing on her face at all. I tried to utter something, but had no clue how to say anything. I looked back to the lady up front, who was helping someone else, nothing. Finally, someone else saw the debacle, and showed me to the other door only 5 feet away, where I paid, then went back to the original door, and collected my damned plugs. Whew.

After this, Claire had been directed to another store, so we walked down the corner to another store, and this felt good immediately. We walked in to see pieces of electronic equipment and cables strewn everywhere. By this time Claire had gotten her bit down about what she needed, and all of the sudden, they were like, "Yeah, Yeah, you need it now?"
We were amazed. They measured out the cable, pulled out the correct plugs after pulling out the wrong ones three times, opened up the plugs, cut the ends of the wires, soldered the plugs to the wires, and voila! After watching for an hour, we had two new completely amazing custom made radio speaker cables. We were so stoked.

The boss-like man came over and inspected the work, "Es muoy cara, muoy cara para el gringo!" he said a few times, luckily joking with us with a big smile on his face. I appreciated how someone else could make light of this hilarious situation as well

Today we found a shoe taylor, and tried to tell them we needed a pistoleramade of leather for our huge, phallic microphone. After talking to them for about ten minutes, punctuated by minutes of no one talking as if we weren't there at all as if the matter was solved, a nice younger muchacho told us there was another store down the road, and took us there. Finally, we arrived to a shop with a wrought iron door. Inside sheets of leather, all colors and patterns, hung from the wall. We were let in, and luckily the shoe taylor explained what we needed, and left after we thanked him for his help. I love these people.

We negotiated exactly what we needed with the guy, and luckily he knew how to speak to gringos, or at least idiots. He spoke using the simplest sentences, and spoke very slowly, most of the time only using a verb and an adverb, or something like that. He told us six hours, we paid half of it then, and will hopefully go back tonight to pick up our pistolera para microphono de selva.

This stuff is pretty fun, and intense, and wonderful. I really appreciate how people approach time down here differently. When someone you need isn't present, you either wait for a few hours until they show up, or come back later. You don't call them and expect them to come back to the office just because you are there expecting them. I love it.

Tomorrow it is off to Puerto Maldonaldo, gateway to the jungle. It is like 15 degrees here, which is almost chilly, and there it is currently 32 degrees, freaking hot and very humid...woohooo! We will be stopping in Cusco, but not exiting the plane, so hopefully I will get to see something out of the plane of the andes and the fabled Cusco. I have been drinking Cuscena this week in hopes of good luck for seeing the city.

I will write more when I have time.

Hotel de Patio

2008-06-01T23:00:00.002-06:00

Bienvenido de Hotel de Patio, en Miraflores, Lima, Peru.

A low marine layer hangs over Lima right now, just a few minutes past midnight, (which is equal to central time zone, US) reminding me of the night I spent in San Francisco over a year ago now. There is an abundance of new smells in the humid air, ranging from sweet colognes of taxi drivers in the airport, to a tinge of sewer in the hotel room. That being said, the room itself is probably 100% better than what I expected, or what I would have ended up staying in left to my own devices. There are two beds! It may be time for a party, who knows. I immediately realize in conversation that I am ready to begin pushing myself to use Spanish, and will do alright for someone who knows almost nothing. There are some people I can understand perfectly, and others I can understand nothing at all.

As for now, I leave you with a view from my hotel room, for it is time to sleep.

Memorial Day Reverie

2008-05-28T07:49:00.002-06:00

It was one of those days when moments crystallize like the antithesis of frost in the sticky sunlight of an early summer afternoon. Lying on my side in my hammock, a cool breeze slowly dried muggy sweat on my back. The sun had just dropped below the horizon of the garage roof, finally casting my hammock into shadowy respite.
Hanging an arm and a leg over the edge, my hand draped across the smooth stomach of my pointer lying on my sleeping bag beneath me. I caressed her lazily, and she nuzzled my hand every few minutes, sneaking a lick from my salty skin when I seemed to care the least. Letting my fingers linger for a moment over her velvet nose, I slid my hand back under her ears to scratch her neck, and my fingers fell upon the plastic clasp of her shock collar. As if so many adolescent years of practice had given my thumb and forefinger perfect memory, the nerves in my fingers fired before any thought, dropping her collar silently onto my sleeping bag.
Looking up to my face, she rolled onto her back, pushing her paw wantonly against my forearm. We stared at each other for a few seconds as the late afternoon breeze swirled tulip poplar petals around us in the grass. I stared into her amber eyes as she lazily gazed back, teasing myself as I always do, wondering what lies behind those eyes I love so much.
The flutter of a pigeon caught her attention and she was off again, chasing a more instinctual love. I watched her pink frothy tongue sway from side to side as she followed the birds with maniacal intent for a few minutes. Then I rolled over and closed my eyes, thinking back to so many days past…
Lying in the sun, our sweaty legs entangled, I stared through your hair into the shadows of your eyes. Waiting, we patiently stared in silence. As the sun sunk lower in the sky, the trees reached up into the light, casting dancing shadows across your face. Beneath a veil of cotton, my fingers danced across the softest skin while we waited for the breeze.
Finally, a murmur swept across the grass and swirled around us, washing away the afternoon heat. With simple surprise in your eyes, your bra fell to the side, and rolling onto my chest, you kissed me with the purest passion. Sun-dappled hair danced across my face as I traced the chill of the breeze across your back.

Hang In There Folks

2008-05-22T18:05:00.003-06:00

The last two months have been quite the flurry. I have been able to catch up with friends, rethink some decisions past and some to come, and plan what I hope to be some amazing months ahead of me.

I will be leaving for Peru in like nine days. I will be there from June 1st, until December 20th, performing ornithological research with a Doctorate student from Oxford University. I hope to keep this blog up to date once a week, however, it may take me awhile to get settled in enough to stay on top of it.

I have been finding myself well since being home. During several hikes alone or with friends, I have caught myself imagining a future here, one with my family, and more sessile friends. I don't know where I will ever find to rest indefintely. I do know I am growing weary of so much moving though...

Here are a few photos from my time back east. Hopefully the next time I post, it will be from Peru.

I hiked from East to Bethlehem, Pa with Silas, as part of his work with a local conservation organization that is creating a trail that follows the historic canal along the Lehigh River. Soaked and growing tired, this sight welcomed us as we entered Bethlehem, thirteen miles later.

After a long day of driving with Nick, we arrived to Burlington, Vermont as the day began to fade. As a rosey hue filtered through the living room, we grabbed drums and jackets, and headed to the park. It was a wonderful closing to a day.

Visiting the Big Apple

2008-05-10T08:23:00.000-06:00

The subway doors close us into a steamy car together, and I immediately feel my ears redden in the heat. As the car accelerates, and the cars grow quieter, I hear Michael Jackson’s Thriller filter through from the back of the car, where I see a tall thin boy in a white t-shirt with jet black hair pulled back strutting around and clapping to the music. A small boy at his side dressed in camo mimics his actions until the taller boy steps to the side of the car, leaving an open space where the small boy is standing.
Together they yell, “Five, Six, SEVEN, EIGHT,” and the little boy jumps into step with the music, dancing in a circle, warming up his feet momentarily.
He quickly drops his hands to the floor and begins an impressive, yet amateur break-dancing sequence. His camo shirt slides up over his shoulders as he pushes up into a back arch, exposing his milk chocolate stomach for a second before his feet leave the ground a second later and he is left in a handstand while still partially in a back arch.
Several of the surrounding passengers smile at the spectacle as the taller boy encourages some applause before taking the dance area. Some passengers step in front of my view, but I see his hands flying around above their heads, and then his feet just as quickly. After about ten seconds straight of feet and hands flying above passengers’ heads, the boy pops back up and returns to a stationary spot against the car door just as the floor begins to quiver and shake as we approach the next stop.
“1st Ave.,” is all I hear over the music. I watch the tall boy wipe some sweat from his forehead as I step off the hot and crowded train.

Once I get away and over the streets clogged with cars and aggressive motorists, and people leaving their terriers shit on the sidewalk, for the first time I feel comfortable enough to be myself in such an atmosphere, and I am even finding some amiable aspects of this city.

A Spring Thunderstorm at Home

2008-05-09T09:55:00.002-06:00

I sat outside last night in the rain. I had attempted to sit outside as the thunderstorm approached our house, but as I walked across the yard in a cool wind with a fresh pot of tea in hand, the first drops hit my arm. A loud murmur swept up the hollow from across the street, and I took off at a run for our house as a downpour engulfed our yard.
Retreating to the cover of my porch, I sat with my back against our front door as rain blew in around me, wetting my legs, and the back of my Mac. I listened to the rain splashing on the road and smacking upon the fresh maple leaves as lightning crystallized the thunderstorm momentarily in bright flashes.

Lights from around the corner swept up the road and past my house as cars passed, casting light on the rain hitting the flooded road. The hush of the thunderstorm quickly regained the night as each car passed slowly in the heavy rain. The storm passed over the ridge across the hollow from my house, casting violent lightning and thunder into the night for over an hour.
Despite the violence of such storms, I find an exhilarating quiet in such events. I meditated on the sounds passing around me as the storm swept across the ridge above my house. I kept my eyes wide open to the night, awaiting each lightning flash eagerly. Watching such storms pass is like watching a secret slideshow. You sit and listen in the darkness, then suddenly the night is momentarily obliterated, and the storm casts light on the scene it is creating around you. One second you may see toads hopping across the road in search of each other, another moment snowy petals blown from an apple tree across the street are crystallized in the air as the tree leans to one side under the breath of the storm.

Once, when I was still quite young during a July thunderstorm, I saw a deer staring out into the field from beneath an apple tree. I sat in the ensuing darkness, straining my eyes to pick the form out of the void beneath the tree. A minute later, the next flash of lightning showed only an empty spot, and the deer was nowhere to be seen.

Returning Home - Part Three, Old Scary Spots, and New Turkeys Trots

2008-05-04T14:56:00.002-06:00

Continuing uphill, I pass into another logged section of forest, choked with slash and briars. I jump from slash pile to slash pile, walking along refuse logs as far as I can in silence, until I either loose my balance or run out of slash. Squirrels that I hadn’t noticed shoot into the trees and chide me from safety after I crash back down onto the leaf-covered forest floor.
At the edge of this logged plot, I return back to forest, and am welcomed by an old ‘NO DUMPING’ sign.

Over years, the maple tree the sign is nailed to has slowly began enveloping the sign as though it were wound from a broken branch. The bark seems to be pouring over the sign in slow motion like thick taffy. Given enough time, it will be gone.
Behind the sign I see an old shack I visited some time ago. I approached slowly, gazing nervously at the large hole going beneath the cabin, from where I heard an alarming noise during high school that sent me running. Having found bear scat this winter, and hearing wolves last week, I felt even more trepidation at approaching this hole.

I stood twenty or so feet away with knife in hand, and snapped a few shots before, shining a light down into the hole. It appeared to be vacant. There were no footprints or animal hair. I walked on, somewhat disappointed.
Following another deer trail from the cabin, I descend another slope, dropping down into another micro-drainage adjacent to the one I had just left. Remarking to myself over the freshness of these prints, I begin to envision walking up on some deer, and then motion up ahead catches my eye. A moment of confusion overcomes me as I see a dark object with a red head and beady black eyes slowly trot away from me behind a fallen log, and I just as quickly realize I walked up on three male turkeys.
I began to trot behind them, skirting fallen logs as much as possible. I followed them for several hundred yards unsure as to how alarmed they really were. Finally I came around a corner within forty yards of them, and their desperation was apparent. Running full out with necks outstretched, they entered another old, eroded springbed full of large rocks, choked with saplings.
I ducked under a few hemlock branches on the edge of the flow, and began hopping anxiously from rock to rock as fast as I could. One gobbler turned towards me, ran a few steps and exploded into flight, and a second did the same a couple seconds later. I picked up my pace to a full out sprint towards the final gobbler, sure it would fly away any moment. The faster I ran, the more nervous it became, zigzagging in confusion through the thick saplings. I was perhaps less than twenty yards from the turkey when it exploded from the ground, wings cracking against the surrounding trees. It looked much larger than I expected in flight.
Silence quickly returned to the forest, until my breathing was all I heard. I smiled at the quaking saplings. Turkeys in the Bald Hills were relatively unheard of growing up, and anyone who claimed they saw some was regarded with considerable skepticism. I felt a little remorse in chasing the turkeys, for they may have broken a few primary flight feathers while taking off in such a tight spot, but the pleasure in knowing they were at least present in these woods again quickly overcame such feelings.
I followed the flight path of the turkeys for a while before turning, back uphill towards the ridge. My feet were growing tired, so it was time for a cold porter back at home.

Waking Up, Reaching Out, and Letting Go this Spring

2008-05-04T14:25:00.003-06:00

Shortly after I woke up this morning I walked outside with my dog, and squinted up into the sky, surveying the promise of the day. Scanning the bright yet cloudy sky, I began to catalogue all the birdsongs surrounding me: A grackle in the neighbor’s locust tree, a robin in the by our driveway maple, a pileated woodpecker lower in the locust tree, a starling flying by, etc. I walked to my car for my binoculars after hearing several unknown songs I had been listening to for several days now across the road in a few large oaks.
My neighbor waved glibly to me as I stood in their driveway, looking down momentarily from my binos. Returning focus to my binos, I chuckled, recounting how it is only when I have binoculars glued to my face with apparent concentration and diligence in my stature that people seem to never mind a trespasser. After identifying a cape may warbler gleaning insects from the undersides of glowing maple leaves, (a first-ever sighting for me), I walked up the street towards another warbler song coming from a yet unknown species in the tall oaks.
Cars swerved around me on their way to church, and I got dirty looks from mothers dressed in their Sunday’s best, leaning over to glare through the car window as they passed me lying on my back along side the road. Staring through binoculars can become extremely uncomfortable and taxing on your neck if the birds are directly above you, and it just so happened that the best place to spot the warblers up high in the oaks above me was by lying on my back on some gravel along side the road.
I watched one bird glean insects from the oak foliage for twenty minutes before it finally showed itself as a black and white warbler as it shook an oak pollen tangle with its beak, and flew out into the sun to catch a fleeing insect in mid air.
After identifying 5 species of warblers in one hour within 100 yards of each other, I walked back to the house for some breakfast with a pleasant outlook on the day’s promise. For me, spring is in full swing today. When the warblers have returned to their breeding grounds from several thousand miles to the South, I know it is time to shove my winter hats and long underwear to the bottom of my backpack.
The coming of spring brings at least some change of life to all of earth. For a smaller population of humans, it brings about a poignant change in lifestyle. Each spring, thousands of researchers take to their offices of sorts, referred to candidly as ‘the field’.
For the majority of scientific history, humans have been on the search, seeking knowledge about this world that we live in. However, recently the majority of scientific research has focused on aspects of climate change. In the face of this phenomenon, scientists now must put this search on hold to take a stern look in the mirror. Scientists are now examining the effects that humans have wrought on the rest of the world.
Human impacts are diverse and pervasive throughout virtually all ecosystems known to date. The media coverage has brought such effects to the forefront of human thought under the title of climate change. While we have long known how strongly our actions can impact our surroundings, humans have only just began electing to change after realizing such actions may be compromising the longevity of our species.
In recent years, we have at least begun to recognize and affirm that there is indeed a need for remediation of our lifestyles. In this short article, I hope to inspire everyone to disregard the definition of humanity that media dictates to us on a daily basis. Science has simply shed light on the dark path we are headed down. However, science alone cannot change the direction we are headed.
This spring, go out and discover the world around you, for it will most assuredly open a window into your own life and actions, allowing you to see how you can make your life (and future lives) better by changing simple things you do throughout your day.

With the late-spring night thunderstorms and a hopeful goodbye to morning frost for nine months, we hear the angels of the forest return to the chorus. We are often awoken in the early morning light to the redundant rounds of robin song, or mockingbirds chiding us for our slumber. I have recently found myself more regularly finding measure in men and women I meet by how they choose to greet the first sound they hear in the morning. I have found that people either roll over beneath the covers, lamenting the end of the night, or their arms stretch out from their cocoon, greeting the new day.
While I do not wish to berate those who return to the night, I do admit some skepticism regarding the life choices someone may be making if they cannot begin each new day reaching out to draw it towards them. I am obviously biased in this matter, for it is the beginning of each new day in which I find precious sanctity. I believe this is one reason such an affinity for the life of birds has impacted my life so strongly.
So many mornings of my life have been composed of solitude, void of other humans who have elected to remain in bed while the day has already begun. In such quiet, removed from such toiling, all that resides beyond the focus of humanity emerges, as though I were being welcomed into a life void of humanity altogether. In such pristine moments, I feel my humanity melt away. It is in creeping across logs and wet leaves, in meeting eyes with a fiery orange box turtle beneath a fallen log, in staring at a wood thrush I have flushed from nest, in watching a warbler tug at oak pollen tangles for hidden insects, and it is in watching a peach-faced cape may warbler smack an insect off a maple leaf with its wing, and snatch it out of the air. It is in such moments when secrets of our sylvan family are unveiled that I see just how shortsighted our species has become after staring through a blurry ethnocentric lens for far too long.
In winter we say ‘tis the season, to be kind or something like that. Well, I say spring ‘tis the season’ to let go of your humanity a little more than you are used to. Take a walk through the forest in your bare feet. Walk slowly as an animal would, and you may learn just why they walk in such a way. Forget about the expectations society chains around your neck. Enter the forest this spring to visit your long forgotten kin, and revel in such freedom of letting go.
Some people resist such thoughts, calling out blasphemy to anyone who wishes to shirk their humanity. I would argue vehemently against this point, recalling that I emerge from such excursions with the extent of my humanity in complete clarity. Many sociologists promote achieving a greater worldview through intercultural experiences, and state that it is through experiencing other cultures that we better understand our own. In this same vein of thought, I am human and will always be human, but when I am able to examine the world around me beyond this lens, a whole new world comes into focus. This is no different than traveling to a new county, state, region, or country and experiencing how their way of life differs, which in return brings greater meaning to your way of life.

So this Spring, as nature reopens its eyes and looks up to the blue sky through blinking flower petals, takes a deep breath with a passing thunderstorm, and sings out in avian voices flitting through the trees, I challenge everyone to wake up and reach out from beneath the chains of your humanity. Go out! Greet the day, and find what it is that lies in confusion beyond your focus. Perhaps you will find a window into your own life, and learn just what it means to be a human in this day of age on this earth.

Returning Home - Part Two, Impending Spring

2008-04-28T10:36:00.005-06:00

I now return to walk around these hills after years of traveling in landscapes heralded for their wild beauty, something I don’t feel I had witnessed until late in my teenage years. Stepping into the forest, my feet fall quietly upon a bed of moist oak leaves.

The sun shines brightly through the broken canopy, yet the rain that fell several days ago can still be felt in the soil. Acorns and beechnut husks press into my feet as I walk up the hillside through thickening briars. Crossing over a neighbor’s four-wheeler path, I stop to momentarily peruse his growing pile of refuse – a few old tires, rusting barrels full of ash, old rain gutters, and rotting plywood. I wish this were an uncommon sight, yet these personal dumps are just as much a part of these woods as the trees that make them.

I continue up the hillside past an old treestand into an area dense with shrubs and briars. Someone cut the trees here while I was still in high school, and promptly set up a hunting spot in the clearing. Surprisingly, the deer trail here didn’t dissolve into the thickening brush over the years. The deer appear to bed in the dense brush in this sheltered area of the mountain, where they are still less than 100 yards from a healthy crop of acorns atop the slope, and only 100 yards from a verdant field below. While I have come to prefer the darker, wetter areas of forest, I see how this is the perfect location for these deer.

Sneaking my way through the briars, I still make a ridiculous amount of noise. I only make it about three steps into the thicket before several deer blast from the other side and dissolve back into the distant silence of the forest just as quickly. Trudging on through the thicket, I follow the well-worn path up to the large oaks above.

A few bright pink acorns riddled with bite marks are splayed open on the forest floor. I wrinkle my nose just thinking of the bitter taste squirrels must endure, or perhaps even relish. I boiled a bowl of acorns with a friend in college once for six hours, and they still tasted like stomach bile. Amidst the destroyed acorns, I find a small seedling gaining purchase on the trail a few feet later, and wonder if it will make it.

It will most likely be nipped at the bud in short order, but with any luck it will be enough time for it to sink a taproot deep enough into the soil to procure adequate moisture to make it through to next year, when it will sprout again, most likely providing fodder for another passing deer. Many hardwood seedlings will live this seemingly menial existence for decades, just garnering enough energy to sink their roots deeper until finally one of their relatives towering above is brought down. Thousands of seedlings begin an immediate race that will last many seasons, even much longer than my life, until the gap is finally closed in again. To me, an oak seedling is something very special. It is a solemn reminder of the strength that exists in everything. Be it two inches or two hundred feet high, I see oak as the backbone of this forest, providing a few leaves each year for a passing deer, or a healthy crop of acorns in its old age. It is a reminder of the natural virtue that exists in all life.

I step out of the forest onto a jeep trail, scanning some deer prints as I pass. I follow the deer trail back into the woods, down over the other side of the ridge, and past an old hunting spot, now tangled with logging slash. Just past our old hunting spot, the forest composition shifts in accord with the soil. An old spring bed over time has been eroded into a stream of large rocks, covered in moss. Small saplings poke out of the rocks like bristles on a brush, while some larger trees skirt the edge where some soil still exists.

A few hundred feet later, the hill flattens out, and the spring returns to the surface. This area is the hidden eden of the Bald Hills. Old trees cling to shallow clay soils soaked in spring vigor. Mayapple has begun sprout amongst the wild periwinkle.

As I scan the understory I can’t help but imagine a hen turkey lying hidden upon eggs somewhere within those verdant stalks. A few years ago during a summer research project I walked within three feet of a hen on 12 eggs without seeing her. She exploded from the late April cover when I was only several feet past her. I jumped and covered my head, thinking I was about to be attacked. Her eggs were mealy brown with reddish brown speckles. A week later we found ten poults hiding in a bush close to the empty nest.

I walk slowly along trickling spring, scanning hopefully for a motionless hen, and I find myself walking along a deer trail again as I come upon a crossing. I scan countless dents in the soil indicating deer still use this crossing regularly, but then I see a different print across the spring pressed into the thick clay. It is an old canine print, most likely a coyote. They have become rather rampant in Pennsylvania, and have even begun to display packing behavior to bring down adult deer. That is the only print I can find, so I move on.

I slosh on along the path until my feet finally tell me they have had enough cold mud, and I turn away from the spring towards the surrounding hills. Where the slopes meet the flatter hollow bottom, a different forest lies hidden. This lucky section of forest is a little too wet too log, yet remains on just enough of a slope to keep from drowning. Older oaks, poplars, and maples are swelling above me, their buds only days away from bursting. In a week or less this bright forest floor will be cast in darkness for several months. A few hemlocks hide here, speckling the forest in a deep, lacey green. Towering hemlocks, several hundred years old once covered these hollows. These hemlocks are now a juvenile image of what they could become in the distance future, but they will most likely never reach such a potential. Tiny white dots speckle these branches upon closer inspection. I reach up, brushing my hand along a branch, and watch it wave back at me for several seconds. This hemlock is perhaps a foot wide at its base, between sixty to eighty years old, and it is as good as dead.

The tiny white dots at the base of each deep green needle are the tell-tale sign of the wooly adelgid, a small, xylophagous (sap-sucking) insect larvae. Generations of these larvae will slowly suck the life out of this tree year after year, until finally it is too weak to combat the challenging environment. Foresters worry the hemlock will succumb to the same fate out chestnuts did some time ago.

Returning Home - Part One, The Bald Hills

2008-04-28T10:24:00.002-06:00

In separation, the heart grows fonder...I am learning this statement should not be taken too lightly. For me, it has taken moving away from home, the place that created me, to truly learn its value. Even now as I sit here on the steps of my driveway writing this on my laptop, toads and frogs sing a song I have listened to for many years. Their song taught my ears how to hear the song of each season, sometimes dainty yet as permeating as the spring peepers, while other times hushed as the winter wind under a frozen clear blue sky. Returning after only a couple years, I now hear the song of this land a little more clearly; an echo shouted across a valley of time, finally returning to my ears.

As much as I fool myself into thinking my home is on my back, my home is much more stationary. I grew up within a land of folded hills that we natives loyally refer to as the mountains. The Appalachian Mountains are very old. They have withered away to only mere remnants of their titanic effigies. Along their far northern extent where I live, they are now measured more accurately in the hundreds of feet.

I grew up looking across the road at a small farm, which nature was slowly taking back. Like most farms during my childhood, at its edge were woods, and this is where the mountain began its rise. This is where my father took me after we dressed in dark camo and painted our faces. This is where I looked as I hung my head out my window during windy summer nights when a full moon illuminated the whispering forest, quieting everything else. This is where I went when I was lost in my life, and when I wanted to be lost from everything else. This is where I went when I needed to be quiet, and when I needed the world to be quiet around me. This is where I learned that there is much more to this world than we are led to believe. This is my home, the Bald Hills.

It wasn’t until high school that I actually learned the most recent name of my home, which referred to the hills directly above my house. Until then my home was simply the name of a street, a town, a state…The Bald Hills were known to harbor bandits and criminals; the way most backwoods areas seem to be characterized. I suppose those people were here for many good reasons, reasons as simple as the name of this place.

The Bald Hills were named so for being just that – bald. Pennsylvania was named for its woods, so of course we cut them all down. With the exception of a few very hard to reach pockets of geographically endowed forest, Penn’s Woods’ arboreal blanket was swiped away in a matter of a few decades. Just like the heat rushes from warm skin when blankets are swiped in the middle of the night, life vanished from the soil once covering these hills. Ironically, the rejuvenating rains that came with the warmth of spring listlessly washed away much of the naked soil. What a chilling reminder it must have been to all of the so-called bandits and criminals seeking refuge in these emaciated hills during long winters back then when wood was still the primary fuel for heating a house. I now wonder if it wasn’t mainly wood that these people were known for pathetically pilfering...

In high school, this name amused me. Picturing what a bleak landscape my home must have been back then only accentuated the ruggedness I projected on those who lived here. Feeling little connection to most of my surroundings during this rebellious time of my life, I felt delight in projecting myself in similar light as the people to come before me.

A Hallowed Chorus

2008-04-17T07:40:00.002-06:00

I felt as though the night was being enveloped in some nocturnal operatic orchestration as one fine note rose from the distant darkness, and danced with the silence around it. I stood in the shadows of a poplar tree, staring up at the moon hovering over the mountains behind my house with wide eyes in disbelief as the undulating tone waned. Then, off in the distance along the ridge an answer; undulating in a similar rhythm but with different tones. What were they saying to each other? Regardless of what they were saying, their chorus penetrated all that was human in my body, and communicated a well of meaning I cannot begin to sound.

photo by: TomClark

I heard wolves last night in Pennsylvania. I was not way up north in Potter or Tioga county, I was in York county, near one of the southernmost cities of the state, yet I heard wolves speaking across a ridge in the middle of the night under bright moonlight. I have no doubt about this, any of you out there who have heard wolves before may agree; there are few things so primal to be heard as the cry of a wolf. There are few sounds so pure that can wash away your humanity, raise the hair on your neck, erase all that surrounds you, and leave a single note resonating within your chest.

Springtime at Home

2008-04-14T15:04:00.004-06:00

Pennsylvania is exuberant in April. Walking around outside these days fills me with excitement and content simultaneously. Pennsylvania welcomes me with a warm and pleasantly humid embrace, and whispers the purest of songs into my ear, telling me to rest, for I am home.
Spring begins its song unhurriedly as winter becomes tired. I heard it this year in Boulder, with the junco’s first trill into the crisp early morning air. The flicker was not long behind the junco. The first one I heard this year stood atop a torn cottonwood along 28th st. in Boulder, spewing its staccato cry as I drove by after a good climbing session. I have come to dislike this call so much after encountering several vociferous individuals. Their loud call echoes over treetops and deafens those unlucky enough to find one tangled in their mist-net.
Driving back into Pennsylvania as the sun was setting, the folded hills, (or mountains as we call them here) began to glow in the waning light. Maple buds shown a scarlet red, and now today they have begun bursting forth with a bright lime green flower. Then a sweeping column of light caught my eye as a four-wheeler spun around the corner of a distant field and barreled down the steep hillside, reminding me I was coming home to a different side of spring as well.

As I pulled up to a past professor’s newly acquired land, the sound of spring enveloped my attention. I stepped out of my vehicle and slammed the door quickly to notify my host I was there, but also to regain silence as quickly as possible to hear the sounds surrounding me. Off in some pencil-necked red pines, a brown tree creeper swung his song around the trees as jubilantly as he circles them in a female’s presence. Then the frogs and toads fell on my ears. Such a beautiful and disarming sound I have yet to find anywhere else. For years I laid with my head hanging out my bedroom window at night until I fell asleep to the sounds of these peepers. The wood frogs had already come and gone, leaving heaps of milky-white eggs in the vernal pools endowed to this rich land, but I still think I heard a few croaking reclusively like an old floorboard in a smoky cabin. After only momentary rests, the peepers reclaim the spring air with a trill I will not even try to describe. I simply implore you to come to the Pennsylvania woods when the earth is waking up to hear such a welcoming sound.
It was the sound of the spring peepers in the pond down behind my house that brought dreams of the lightning bugs yet to come during my childhood. As post-mating pleasure deflated the peepers’ vigor, unable to sleep in such quietude I began to gaze into the warmer evenings with my windows open. After many nights blanketed in black with occasional silvery moonlight, I would finally see them. Arriving like heralded ghosts, I would squint into the night; never completely sure of my eyes for some time. The earliest intrepids would flicker their butts perhaps only once or twice every five minutes as they climbed the branches of my neighbors apple trees, but as they dropped from the treetops and lifted into flight I was made sure of their presence, as they flickered off into the fields around my house to find others. These early fireflies had a tough time, much tougher than those to arrive a few weeks later to a veritable orgy filling the field behind my house with such an ethereal dance the heavens must become jealous.

Sloshing through the marshy creeks braiding through the land, C.C. showed me around to the pools and ponds as we shared enjoyment of the season’s magnificence. We stopped from time to time, glassing the pond in attempts to identify a sheepish fox sparrow or swamp sparrow flitting around the grass and tree branches. Sparrows still seem hopeless to me, but C.C.’s interest in them reminded me that while my true interests will never lead me astray, my love for Natural History should remain broad and encompassing.
Twenty minutes down the road at Bucknell, similar songs welcomed me. I took a walk with another friend, laying on the ground from time to time to get a closer look at some of the first spring flowers that polka-dot the lesser-known wilder lawns of the University. It is so sweet to be home in the welcoming arms of my spring birthday in Pennsylvania, full of April vigor.

Lake Crescent, Washington - Teaching at Olympic Park Institute

2008-03-27T23:08:00.004-06:00

Here are some photos from the past week to check out. I will be uploading more in the coming week, and I will try to write as I have time. I am currently on the Olympic Peninsula, teaching Forest Ecology and Natural History at the Olympic Park Institute.

The sound of the students' paddles pounding on the gunnels of the 20 person canoe boomed across the lake as the early morning sun shed warmth on the snow covered trees surrounding Lake Crescent. We stopped from time to time, and the kids looked around at the surrounding mountains, and down below into the shimmering emerald waters. Many of them remarked at Mt. Storm King, a mountain they had climbed the day before; a first for many of them, and something they all claimed to be very special to them.
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Marymere falls tumbles some 180 feet, spraying mist on us as we approach and lean over the wet cedar railings. A swift breeze chills my face and neck as I pull out my camera to take a picture of these murmuring falls.
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Kids ran around screaming as they threw muddy snowballs at each other after breakfast. Fat snowflakes fell on my cheeks and hair, casting dimples across my face and across the lake.
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Beginning of Lasts, for awhile....

2008-03-20T10:08:00.002-06:00

This morning, I got up at sunrise to watch the sunlight glint upon The Divide one last time, at least for awhile...

Later, I stepped out into the relentless Estes wind and walked past the first place Sara lived during her first Winter in Estes Park. I imagined I could look through the walls as I walked past, able to see shadows of our memories, laying in each other's arms while the Winter wind wailed on our warm cabin.

The early Spring provided a pleasant distraction as I walked down the road towards Kind Coffee. Pygmy nuthatches sailed in the wind, sallying between trees, sometimes carrying a fat larvae in their beak to a hidden crevice in a dead tree. A magpie dove and bobbed up behind a much smaller chickadee, chasing it for awhile before veering off in its original direction toward the Big Thompson river. The way the magpie dashed at the chickadee with a seemingly relentless vigor, and listlessly turned direction a second later reminded me of Farley Mowat's descriptions of arctic wolves darting at caribou herds maliciously, only to run through the herd, giving no serious chase to any individual. I guess the magpie was just checking for the chickadee's health, in case an easy meal should be awaiting...

I watched a red-tail circle over a field continuously. Its bright rusty tail danced in the wind, keeping the hawk moving slowly across the field in the strong wind. Chickadees, nuthatches, juncos, and finches all fell quiet below the hawk, sticking to the thicker parts of the ponderosa until the dark shadow above passed.

Goodbye Estes Park, Continental Divide, birds, and all the memories, at least for awhile...

Hungry at Home - One Idea for Change

2008-03-17T14:38:00.003-06:00

For all I know this idea has already been cast out there to make a change in our homes, but here is something I have been finding myself doing for several years, and I thought it might help if more people started doing. So, I did some reasearch, and some math, and here is what I have come up with.

In October of 2006, the population of America (USA) broke a landmark, 300 million. Today, we are at 304,063,731.

Roughly 3.5 million, or 1% of our nation's population are homeless, in that they spent a significant period of their life sleeping in automobiles, cardboard boxes, tents, caves or railcars. Roughly the same number of our population are considered malnourished with inadequate housing. Approximately 12% of our population is malnourished even with adequate housing.

This means that if just 75 million people in our country (that's 25%) pick one meal a week to buy a meal for a homeless person or someone in need, our country's level of malnourishment within homeless populations could be nearly eradicated.

This is by no means a cure for a nationwide problem. But now a-days I find most people (myself included) feel disassociated with the ability make a large change in the world. This is one way that collectively, we could make a huge change in the world, by buying one meal a week for someone in need.
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Last week I asked someone I commonly see in Boulder, (known as the High Plains Traveller) if I could buy him anything that would help, perhaps a meal, or a warm drink, and he said all he could use was a Hot Chocolate at the moment. So, I walked up to the local cafe, and I bought him a large hot Chocolate with whip cream. After I gave it back to him, we talked about some of the incense he was burning for a few minutes, and then I went my way.

Today, I passed someone else on an offramp, an older lady, with a sign for help. I decided I had some money to spare again, so I dropped my car off to get brakes, and walked over to the nearest Whole Foods. I bought a whole Rotisserie chicken for $10, and a two month supply of multivitamins for women for $10, for a total of $20.

I walked the 10 minutes over to her on the offramp, handed it to her, saying "I hope this helps."

She said thanks twice, and smiled widely when I told her it was a chicken. Then I turned and walked away, not knowing what else to say. I never know what to think other than if I was that lady, I think that would help me, but I always find myself wondering if I am really helping these people. I must be helping these people, because I know for a fact that if 74.99 million people every week took it up on themselves to buy someone in need a meal, no one would be malnourished.

I always want to sit and talk to these people, for I would love to speak to someone. Being homeless and malnourished must be lonely at times. However, only a few times have I been able to successfully sit down and have a conversation in this circumstance. It seems that most times the difference in our worlds are so great, it is difficult to even speak to each other, as if we were of different language or culture.

Anyways, I have decided that this is going to be something I am personally pledging to myself to do every week. I hope you will join me in this pledge to help others for no other reason than if you were in such a situation, you would hope others kindness would keep you alive. Please turn your kindness into something powerful to keep someone alive, and please share this idea or post with other people.

Morning Walk Part Two- Geology supports our Ecology

2008-03-11T13:03:00.002-06:00

As I finished up my last post, I mentioned how my time living around the foothills has been quite the study of microclimates. There are such sudden changes in this land, and such sudden changes in the vegetation. What first strikes me as a bleak landscape, always diverts my attention to what signs of ecology are present, and it always seems to start with the geology.

Some 70-40 million years ago Colorado, and much of today's U.S. was a vast inland ocean, covering the majority of the country. But a hotspot was forming beneath the earth's crust as a continental plate to the south of North America subducted and melted, creating great pressure just beneath the surface of this ocean. What has become known as the Laramide Orogeny (meaning uplifting) was essentially no more than a massive blister on the surface of the earth, that erupted. Massive volcanoes rose out of the ocean as the sea level fell away from the whole continent. These volcanoes have since eroded, leaving only their granitic roots exposed within the heart of the Rockies. Over millions of years, the seabed turned to a hard crust beneath the weight of ocean. This plastic crust bent upwards as this volcanic blister rose from the depths of the earth. Over many years, these sandstone rocks were heated to high enough temperature for long enough times to change their composition, or metamorphose them the same way we heat sand up to change it into glass.

The foothills and flatirons are the relics of these ancient seabeds that were bent up into the sky as the rockies rose up from beneath them. This creates little ridges all over the foothills where one side (the southern side) gets bathed in sun all day long, while the other side (the northern side) receives almost no direct sunlight. As lichens grow communities on these bare rocks and invite other organisms to the new community, soils begin to form in the crevices of the aging rocks, and over time the soil gets deep enough to support fields and even forests. This is where the amazing things happens.

The term microclimate refers to, a specific climate that exists within a specific area. So, while the general temperature along the front range today is currently 55 degrees F, the northern shaded side of these ridges may be 40 or 45 degrees F, while the sunny southern side may be close to 70 degrees F. This creates massive differences when you take seasonal weather extremes into consideration.

So, in this photo above, you can see where the northern side of the slope to the right still maintains snowcover from over a week ago, while the sunny southern side to the left of the photo is completely void of snow. This speed at which this snow melts on either side of the slope creates huge temperature and relative humidity differences on a daily basis, and the vegetation bears witness to this. The left side of the photo shows rocks, ponderosa pines, and short grass and succulent species, while the right side of the photo clearly shows higher density of ponderosa pine, and taller scrub oak and other shrubby species. It is amazing to sit around and witness the ways the animals that live in these foothills have adapted to these diverse microclimates. We are still slowly learning their adaptations. Take deer for one example.

Deer sleep in the cover of the higher shrubs, and graze on the vegetation of the drier areas during the day. That is all cool, but what blows me away is how they affect the landscape.

Most people are aware of the ancient Inca populations that lived high in the mountains, and terraced their lands so that they could still perform agriculture without rain eroding their bare slopes during tilling and planting times. Do you think they learned this through an epiphany one day? NO! Alpaca and other llama like species graze these alpine hillsides, and over generations, their trails form mini-terraces, perhaps 3-6 inches wide. Our deer to the same exact thing. Year after year, they form trails that run parallel to their older trails. This minimizes the impact over any one area, and at the same time also improves the ability of the land to stand up to severe weather! Below is a photo I tried to manipulate to show these terraces on the hill. The youngest trails reflect light the best. I haven't gotten a really good picture of this yet, but if you see the whitish lines in the middle of the photo that go up and down, these are the terrace-like trails formed by the deer of the foothills.

I know this photo isn't the best yet, but how amazing is that?!

Morning Walk Part One- Colorado Foothills

2008-03-11T11:42:00.005-06:00

After a wonderful conversation with someone in the UK this morning, I went for a walk in the foothills. I began walking from the parking lot along a gravel path. Random runners and mothers running with strollers passed me every few minutes, looking at me as though it was odd I was walking.

There was barely a cloud in the sky. Far to the north, faint hues of cirrus whispered across the sky. A cold wind blew between the gaps in the foothills. I began to mentally prepare myself for a cold hike, but looked up ahead hopefully at a small ridge that I hoped that sheltered from the wind.

A few minutes later I cut off from the gravel trail and began making my way across the field. Meadow Larks dropped their songs into the air like cold water trickling over rocks Their nebulous voices always leave me completely unsure of where they are. Sometimes I feel sure they are only 25 feet away, only to find out they are over 200 feet away. They almost always are perched atop some yucca flower stalk or scrub oak branch. Not only do their feathers camouflage them very well, they also reflect light with the same intensity as the dry prairie grass, making them blend regardless of what angle you may be searching from.

The field slowly began to bend upwards into a ravine. As I scanned the hills for deer and birds, something white caught my eye. It was the remains of a deer. Teeth marks riddled the remains of the spinal column where raccoons and mice gnawed on the bones through the night to get much needed calcium. I have found deer bones almost every time I have gone hiking in the foothills.

Some birds caught my eye up the hill atop some rocks. A brilliant blue flash let me know mountain bluebirds were about. I stalked up to them, my presence quite obvious, just attempting not to scare them away. I managed to snap a few photos before they flew down over the ravine to the next rise in the land. The longer I watched, more of them alighted from around me, 18 in all, male and dusky female alike.

I waited for a few minutes, hoping they would return to the prominent rock I flushed them from, but they didn't. I continued up the ravine, and it flattened out momentarily before sloping up into a deeper ravine. My time living around the foothills has been quite the study of microclimates. There are such sudden changes in this land, and such sudden changes in the vegetation. What first strikes me as a bleak landscape, always diverts my attention to what signs of ecology are present, and it always seems to start with the geology, but I'll save that for the next entry.

Familiaris - Scarlet Tanager

2008-03-05T13:40:00.010-07:00

One winter when I was perhaps twelve, Silas and I were walking down the snow-covered road towards another friend’s house, sleds in tow. Fresh snow blanketed the Pennsylvania woods, insulating a calm stillness. Our boots thudded with each step, and skidded over the gravel beneath the snow. Despite this calm, the sudden quiet made us look up from our feet periodically as though we were being watched. We were the only things moving it seemed; the only things not covered in snow. I scanned the barren canopy above us, squinting into the bright white void above. Usually a flock of titmice or chickadees could be seen flitting through the tops of the tall tulip poplars and oaks in the forest surrounding us, but even these individuals appeared to yield their daily duties to the sudden change of weather.

Finally, off in the distance a bright scarlet flash exploded from the white stillness. I remember yelling something to Silas, and took off after the aberration. I knew it. Deep down, I felt it was the bird; one of the few remaining left in my bird book to check off. Running up the road, my boots thudding only slightly louder than my heart, I stared into the trees. I needed only one more glimpse to be sure.

“It’s a scarlet tanager,” I exclaimed to Silas, “I know it! That’s the first I have ever seen!” Saying its name helped me feel convinced of its presence, as though its name could draw it from the woods. However, after one intrepid outburst, only the calm quiet remained.

Later I showed everyone the drawing of the only bird I know that is brighter red than the eastern cardinal. Even in this drawing, its bright red body seemed to glow, and over the years I had repeatedly daydreamed of seeing one dart through the forest. However, despite all of this excitement, I felt a doubt in the pit of my stomach that I was wrong, but I couldn’t deny myself the pleasure of such a sighting. So, I told only the people I felt wouldn’t even know what a tanager was in the first place so I could relish in the pleasure of denial.

It wasn’t until years later that I would come to acknowledge the fact that I was definitely mistaken in my excitement, and that there was no possible way I had seen a scarlet tanager in Pennsylvania, in the dead of winter. Most of them were thousands of miles to the South, waiting out the northern winter in the tropical latitudes of the Andean mountains.

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Having completed my first two semesters of college with desperate success, I returned home for a week before heading North to the Adirondacks with Silas. We were about to begin another adventure together working on a trail crew in the muddy, black fly infested High Peaks Wilderness Area. One year of college had brought much change and distance to our previous lives, and deep down I think we were both tormented over the possibility that our childhood, or even our dear friendship, was fading.

Similarly, I had never spent so much time away from my home. Being away from home was never really an issue in my life, but being gone for so long subtly changed the way I felt up on returning nonetheless. For the last nine months my home had become hours reading in 7th st café, a lecture room of sleepy faces, and a wonderfully large single dorm room. Yet as I walked around the flowerbeds in my yard and looked up the hill into the verdant forests, an underlying tone girded a marginal sense of comfort that was relaxing all the same.

While my family was off to work, I enjoyed several days void of responsibility. The soil was warm and wet, and as I walked around the lush grass inspecting hundreds of brown mushrooms, mud squeezed in between my toes. The bright morning sun brought hazy heat to the day quickly, but luckily there was relief to this day. In the afternoon, a warm breeze swept in over the western ridge, sending undulating murmurs through the forest.

With no pressing engagements, I slipped on my moccasins and wandered across the road, past the apple trees in Mrs. Hollerbush’s old overgrown farm, and finally up into the edge of the oak forest. My feet slipped on acorns and soft soil as I followed the same deer trails as always into the forest. Things atop the ridge however, were quite different. My father had told me how the loggers’ promises had finally sunken in the ears of local landowners looking for money, and finally the forest I knew growing up became a memory. As I topped out on the ridge, the forest opened up and was hot. All of the large poplars and oaks were gone, as well as many of the maples. With reserved dismay, I surveyed the new forest. Large patches where laurel and rhododendron had blanketed the understory were now replaced by tangles of choking jaggers. I felt embarrassed as I looked up to the remaining trees. They looked awkward and sheepish, like the first day of middle school when every year several unlucky boys realize that over the summer they suddenly became several inches taller and much skinnier than everyone else.

Luckily that moment didn’t last long. A flicker in the bushes caught my eye, and an odd rusty colored sparrow-like bird flitted through tangles. A small flock of titmice ensued, and then there was a cardinal. I followed them, trying to get a better look at the unknown bird for a minute before they flitted off out of sight. There was still life here indeed, and animals I didn’t know. As I walked across a fallen poplar left behind by the loggers, I thought about how I had never seen those birds at this place before. This change in forest and the new food and shelter the jaggers brought had also brought different birds to this spot in the forest. Later the next year in college, I would learn what edge habitat and forest succession was, but right now I was still slightly dismayed over the change in my home forests. I crossed the deep scar of the jeep trail, and continued down past our hunting trees almost completely atop fallen refuse logs. At this point in the forest, the soil drops away leaving a sea of small, moss covered boulders amidst smaller trees. I hopped along atop the boulders, feeling their rough edges through my moccasins as I followed the slope down until it flattened out in the valley floor. I followed the spring that emerged here as I had done many times, and then cut back up into the forest where the laurel was thick.

As I got to the pinkster bush I had seen the hummingbird moth at the previous year, I paused to look around. The pale pink blossoms were fading, most of them having shriveled past prime. Realizing there were most likely no sightings to be had, my attention turned to the canopy. I followed some chickadees floating from tree to tree, and my eyes fell upon a large oak farther off through the forest, where I saw two larger birds in the shadows up high. As I worked my way over to the tree, a loud bird song came from up high in the oak. It was playful and screechy, similar to a finch in the morning. I called back absent mindedly, attempting to mimic the call, looking up into the oak as I finished.

My mouth dropped wide open as a fiery red bird dropped straight out of the canopy and alighted weightlessly upon the lowest branch of the oak. Its jet-black wings brought great contrast to its glowing red body. He leaned forward anxiously, cocking his head back and forth before flying out to the end of the branch for a better look.

photo by: mrBobBaker - flickr.com

My gaping mouth curled into a grin as I stood there silently in realization that a male Scarlet Tanager had just taken my return call for a challenging male entering his territory. I called back again, and the male flew towards me without leaving the large oak tree. Aching to get a better look, I took a step forward but the dry leaves alerted the male to my presence, and he flew back up into the canopy.

I was elated. I had just seen a bird that I had been searching for since I was a child. I looked back at the large oak over my shoulder as I walked away, grinning in pleasure. Moving on up the trail, I began to look for other large oaks, and scanned the canopy for any bright red bird. Ten minutes later I came upon several mature oak trees, and paused to scan their canopy. My jaw dropped and my face tightened into a grin simultaneously as another male tanager glowed brightly against the bright green oak leaves.

photo by: jayhawk6 - Flickr.com

I watched the bird in awe for a few minutes, and a pale olive colored bird flitted through the oaks around the male. I slowly pulled out my Audubon guide, and flipped to the section about tanagers. The description said something like, widespread and uncommon. Found in the canopies of mature deciduous forest in the eastern U.S. This description was so dry and sterile, yet it was so succinct and correct. If the description had just as plainly instructed me to go walk around a tall forest and look up high in the trees for this bird, I wonder if I would have found them any quicker?

This was the first time I realized that what I had been doing subconsciously for years was actually very important to finding birds, or anything. While I knew where and how to look for common birds such as bluebirds, chickadees, titmice, and woodpeckers, and the patterns of their presence had become very familiar to me, I had never realized that most animals follow very distinct patterns and live in very specific places. After that day, I began to read each description of the birds I had yet to discover for myself very closely. I wasn’t able to memorize things as easily anymore. So, I began to read the book in the woods, and then go searching for individual birds. At this time, I still had yet to find anyone to share this delight with. Perhaps it was just the lingering urge to be alone after the past several years of relative solitude, or perhaps it was just too hard to have such experiences with other people present. Nonetheless I savored these hikes through the woods.

A week later Silas and I packed up and left for our summer in the Adirondacks. It would be several years before I would find myself walking through these woods again, and several more years after that before someone came along to share these experiences with me. Whenever I hear the finch-like screech of a tanager call, everything else seems to fade away, and I can’t resist walking away from whomever I am with to call in these magnificent jewels of the forest.

Familiaris - Finding More Secrets, Looking for Myself

2008-03-03T09:57:00.006-07:00

I was feeling a little pressure to get a new post out for people to continue reading, so here it is. It is a continuation of Familiaris. I haven't done enough editing on it yet, so if you care to, please notify me of any mistakes/typos.
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The closing year of high school brought massive changes to my life. At nineteen years old, I was slowly emerging from a rather tumultuous time in my life shadowed by pointless acts of vandalism and selfishness. Amidst the fading shame on my name and family, I found solace in being alone. For the first time in my life, a book brought me the relief I needed. The distant promise of college provided a means of escape; a place I could start over. My AP English reading list was one of the final important steps for me to take towards college. I still hated reading, and rarely read any book whatsoever. However, college was an unknown. It was a step towards a new challenge, and it scared me to think I may no longer be able to achieve good grades for little input. It would be necessary, so I was told, to begin studying more than ever before, and this meant reading.

So, I scanned the sterile white sheet AP reading list, and wandered through Border’s hoping something would be better than all the inane books we had read in school. Very basically, I believe you can judge a book by its cover. It was the books with the most enigmatic titles with intriguing covers that attracted me. I picked up Catch-22 - a simple cliché that I had heard many times, yet never understood. The cover had a matte finish, with simple white and blue borders, and some scribbled red cartoon of a man in the center. I didn’t know what it was, but it clearly meant something. This book opened the world of creativity to me. It was simply creative, yet gripping - a story based on a defining time in human history, which told a story through detailing the intricacies that bind people together through seemingly banal events.

I started the next book ten minutes after finishing Catch-22. I began reading in most of my classes, hiding my novels inside the textbook for each class as though it were some playboy I was hiding. Come Spring, I had read 56 books, and I felt like a new person. I had taken to wandering the nature section of Border’s, for I found more books there that detailed subjects I already knew well. I stumbled upon books by Tom Brown Jr, and this was the first time I came to understand that people could make a living and publish books based on their experiences in nature, all they need to do is detail them in an attractive way. These books returned me to my childhood, and soon I began to feel the anxious restlessness returning to my legs. I began to writhe in the chairs beneath my ass again. Whereas books had finally brought calm and stillness to my days, I could no longer focus, and the people surrounding me at Border’s began to draw my attention more than the pages before me. So, I began to read alone in my house, but when my family was home, I could not be left alone, and this in turn led me to the final escape that had cradled me so many times in my life – the woods.

Now in the spring of my final year of high school, I began a habit of packing a backpack with books and bread, and headed into the woods around my house after school and on the weekends. I would sit upright against the same oaks I would hunt from in the fall, but still my attention wavered. The stories of Tom Brown Jr. did more than return me to childhood memories; they turned me into a child again. These stories cultivated an excitement to reacquaint me with the secrets that hid in these woods.

With moccasins upon my feet, I would crawl across fallen trees, tracing the scratchy tracks of gray squirrels, following them through the forest, examining the remaining shells of acorns left in their wake. I would hold the shells close to my face until I could see the individual teeth marks where their sharp teeth incised the hard, polished shells. I began to find myself picking up acorns and biting them open. The bitter taste appalled me, and later when I would wash my hands in the sink at home, I understood why squirrels mouths were often so brown - not from the dirt from which they excavated their cache, but from the bitter tannins that stained my fingers brown for days.

I would hop from tree to tree as silently as possible. If I had to step upon the loud forest floor, I learned how to do so without creating an explosion of sound. I began to move quickly through the woods, sometimes unexpectedly coming up behind the animal whose tracks I was following. One time this led me to an abandoned hunting shack in the woods. I vacantly followed the tracks right up to within ten feet of the burrow opening that dove beneath the shack until I was stopped with a shudder at the sound of a loud exclamation. It was something between a horribly loud sneeze and a snarl. I jumped and spun around, looking behind me, then back into the dark burrow opening. I stood frozen as my heart began to pound in my ears. After one more horribly scarey ‘sneeze’ I backed away a few steps, turned, and ran fifty feet before stopping to watch the hole and to compose my pounding heart, but nothing came from the darkness. I walked away confused and scared for the first time ever in the woods. To this day I don’t know what that was.

A few weeks later I went into the woods again to wander and stalk. I went straight up the mountainside following deer trails, and inspected several well-worn buck rubs along the way. Being spring, none of them were fresh, but it was interesting to compare the difference in the bucks’ choices of trees, how heavily they damaged each small tree, and the designs that were left behind from their hormonal frustrations.

I followed the trails up to the ridge, where they dipped down towards a drainage on the wetter, northern side of the ridge. As usual, I passed between the trees my father and I had been hunting in together for years, looking momentarily up into my tree. A hook stuck out from the tree some twenty feet up, where I would hang my bow while awaiting a passing deer.

As the slope flattened out below our hunting spot, the trees grew smaller and the forest grew a bit darker. Two hundred years ago these Pennsylvanian forests were nearly dark as night all day long. Towering hemlocks shaded bright orange clay-bed springs, where brook trout most likely lived long sheltered lives. Now there were gangly saplings of beech and tulip poplar amidst the young hemlock that were slowly succeeding in the wake of the heavy logging of the late 1800’s for which these Bald Hills got their name.

I followed the spring, jumping across from time to time to test my abilities. Bright orange slick spots, worn with hoof prints showed where some deer thought it easier to just walk through the chilling water than to jump. I looked around at the muddy deer paths that riddled this area, and watched the chickadees flit across the white sky from poplar to poplar, inspecting the dry, skeletal tulips for spider eggs.

Once I had followed the drainage far enough, I turned back to the south, and headed back up towards the ridge that would lead me homeward. The forest thickened with poplar and now oak joining in where the soil was slightly drier, but still quite wet. Pushing through thickets of rhododendron, I wiped cobwebs from my hair, and pushed on. Emerging from one thicket I looked up to see a tall and slender bush of rhodo with pale pink trumpet-like flowers. I stopped in confusion, wondering what plant this was, and just then a hummingbird flew up. It was bright orange-red, with darker stripes on its body. I had seen some of these odd hummingbirds only twice before, when I was quite young, and they simply zipped into our yard, inspecting our hanging laundry before disappearing over the trees.

I walked up slowly, but the hummer didn’t seem to notice, or mind at least. As I approached to within a foot of the bush, it shot away to a neighboring bush, and I took the moment to jump into the center of the unoccupied bush in hopes that it would return. I stood motionless as I watched the hummer work through the fragile looking flowers, and all of the sudden it returned to the bush where I was standing. My face contorted into complete confusion as the hummer inches from my face transformed into some type of insect, or was it a moth? I leaned forward to the point where I could feel the air stirred from its wings tickling my nose. The front legs of the reddish creature reached out to the pink flowers as a dark tube unfurled from its head and plumbed the flower’s depth with the softness of an artist’s brush upon canvas. Having spent about two seconds per flower, the creature exhausted its options in less than a minute, and disappeared. While it was there, it stayed still enough at each flower for me to figure out with some assurance that it was apparently some type of moth.

I turned and started running home. I felt as though I had just identified a new species in the woods of Pennsylvania. No one had ever told me of this amazing creature, surely it was because no one had ever seen it. But indeed, this was not so. I first ran up to my room and opened my Audubon nature guide to the east. Leafing through the lesser-known pages where the insects were, there it was, the sphinx moth, but something wasn’t right. This one wasn’t the right color, and the one I saw had a more red body, and compact wings that I couldn’t even see. I turned the page and there was the one I saw - the clear-winged hummingbird moth. I laughed out loud with a smile realizing that, judging by its name, I wasn’t the first to have such a confusing experience with this moth. The moth had a reddish body with clear wings! What an amazing thing, to live and play in these woods for nineteen years, and to still find things I never knew existed.

I leafed through the book, and found the plant that resembled the thick rhodo thickets that covered the lower north facing slopes. It was pinkster, a species of Kalmia, more commonly known as mountain laurel. I had never seen this plant before either. I felt like the woods had showed me some secret most people knew nothing about. I felt it was my secret, and to see pictures of these organisms in this book gave me a wider realization that there were other people out there who must have had these same experiences. This book became a passageway into new feelings of acceptance and inclusion into an unknown group of people. After that, I never went into the woods without that book. Someone had done a lot of work before me, and I was determined to learn it all, and luckily I had to be in the woods to do so.

Revival

2008-02-25T10:57:00.002-07:00

The other morning I rode away from my apt. and heard the juncos whispering waves of song into the crisp morning air. I have been noticing male flickers standing atop dead trees again, and they too are beginning their territorial claims in song.

I guessed this is about the time the Cardinals should be singing from the treetops of the maples outside of Smith and 7th St. Cafe back at Bucknell. I was looking through some old LJ entries from three years ago, and the first I heard their calls back then was Feb 7th. Now, out west I have the juncos and the flickers, not that I didn't in Pa though...

Sara and I keep remarking over the smells returning to the air as well. We can smell the warming, wet ground again, and the dew drying from the dead grass.

Fill me with song sweet Spring.

Familiaris - Cedar Waxwing

2008-02-23T08:30:00.004-07:00

Familiaris, the latin base for several common english words, most directly translates to 'domestic', or so an online etymology dictionary tells me. Thus, this series of entries details the process of what is now commonly referred to as Developing a Sense of Place, or becoming familiar, familiar with one's domestic surrounding. I hope you enjoy.
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I believe I was about nine or ten when I saw my first cedar waxwing. By then I had taken several birdwatching trips with my Aunt Lucille, to whom I owe a massive debt of gratitude for showing me that there were other people out there who were just as passionately fascinated with the avian lives surrounding us.

At this age, I had memorized the birds in my Roger Tory Peterson’s First Guide to North American Birds, and I had seen most of the birds in this book. The few that I hadn’t seen seemed to accompany my every thought when I was alone and outdoors. The longer I waited to see them, the more majestic they became. A glance of a dark, unrecognizable bird in a treetop far away began eliciting reckless romps through the woods behind my house, most of the time only to find another blue jay hawking through the canopy, searching for nests to terrorize. I had begun to take some interest in reading the quaint descriptions of each species I had yet to see, and slowly I began to memorize these descriptions as I had each picture in the book, but nothing replaces first hand understanding born of intimate observation.

One morning I was standing outside, thrashing a black locust branch across random objects, again laying waste to imaginary foes when I heard a sweeping swoosh above my head accompanied by many nearly inaudible high-pitched staccato chirps. A cloud of nearly twenty dusky birds swept into the gangly black locust tree next to me. I stared up at them, frozen with confusion. I had never seen any flock of birds like this before. One of them swept over to the holly tree ten feet away and froze momentarily enough for me to see a dark crest upon its head. For a moment, its stout beak and crest made me almost see an unfortunately discolored cardinal, but with the flash of a few red feathers protruding from dark wings, the pages of my bird book ruffled past in my mind, leaving me staring at the correct page of my field guide, a flock of Cedar Waxwings…

Motionless, I stared upward, stick hanging loosely in my hand as I watched the flock move busily through the crown of the trees, calling to each other incessantly. I have found few other experiences in my life that bring such a calming stillness to my mind and body as the first time I see a bird new to my eyes.

They flitted from branch to branch, flipping upside down as they seemed to be searching the branches for food. They hurriedly floated from the black locust to a sugar maple, then to the red maple in my front lawn. Keeping my distance, I followed them slowly as though they were my first ‘love’ in fourth grade. Then, only a minute later they let up a chorus and flitted across the road and out of my yard.
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In the passing years, I only saw a similar flock three more times, each time almost identical as the last. The flock would sweep into my yard, alighting directly into the black locust tree in my yard, and disappear a few minutes later after working through several trees in my yard. It wasn’t until college that I observed a more intimate account of their behavior. If only fourth grade infatuations were so simple…

My senior year at Bucknell I had a wonderful dorm room where I could watch abundant nature. Yellow jackets pollinated the pepper plants I grew on my windowsill. Cats chased rabbits and squirrels from bush to bush. In the fall, I saw several warblers pass through the spruces and small hemlocks on their journey to southern climates. Later, robust chickadees picked spider eggs and papery seeds from the hemlocks in the winter. And in the spring I witnessed a few wonderful events.

One of my favorite springtime treats are maple-icicles. As the trees awaken in the waxing spring sun, branch tips broken off by winter storms bleed sugary sap, which then freezes overnight. As if working to level the playing field among maples, the sharp teeth of gray squirrels bleed trees lucky enough to weather a rough winter unscathed. Climbing out to the ends of each branch, the squirrels nip off the swelling buds, and return hours later to nurse the sweet, calorie-rich exudate.

This action does not go unnoticed however. Across the paved path one morning while I was watching the squirrels suckle their crop of maple syrup, a flock of birds swept into one of the ornamental cherry trees that are so common on college campuses. Their high pitch calls sparked the fuel of reminiscence, and I was a kid again, watching their red and yellow flickering feathers bring my memory aflame.

They acrobatically plucked cherries from the branches nearly the size of their head, and gulped them with careless gluttony. As their crops filled, they teetered on the edges of their branches, while some of them watched lethargically from the ground. I had recently read some of Rachel Carson’s accounts of waxwings drunk and stupid from juniper berries often dying similar deaths as human drunks – either from consumption itself, or from heedless actions resulting in death. I chuckled, wondering how many of them were succumbing to the intoxication of the winter cherry, fermented while hanging on the branch for months past ripeness.

Several minutes later, a few of the less indulgent individuals fluttered across the path to the bleeding maple. They hopped right out to the end of some branches and stretched to the dripping branches overhead. Some would hang upside down for minutes, patiently licking drop after sugary drop.

It didn’t take long for the gray squirrel to return to the tree. Chattering like a mother shooing hungry children from a warm pie, it rushed up the trunk, avidly defending its bounty. The waxwings simply fluttered from branch to branch a little more hurriedly, barely acknowledging the squirrel’s audible distress.

In the short week or two it took for the tree to send the majority of its winter store of sap into fresh green buds and bright, unfurling leaves, I witnessed squirrels, waxwings, chickadees, nuthatches, and blue jays all visiting this single tree outside my dorm room window. Of course, I didn’t stop visiting the trees during the coldest spring mornings to pluck my share of sugary delight from the tree. Rather, in the presence of such kin I celebrated the sweetness all the more, relishing a shared delight in transcendence from the quiet desperation surrounding me.

Familiaris - Indoctrinations of Stillness

2008-02-22T13:14:00.002-07:00

I first thought of titling the ensuing series of entries Becoming Familiar, but I often feel many of my titles lack substance and clear embodiment of what I am writing. As I thought about why Becoming Familiar seemed an appropriate title I tried to trace the origin of these words in my mind, before realizing just how simple this connection was.

Familiaris, the latin base for several common english words, most directly translates to 'domestic', or so an online etymology dictionary tells me. Thus, this series of entries details the process of what is now commonly referred to as Developing a Sense of Place, or becoming familiar, familiar with one's domestic surrounding. I hope you enjoy.

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When I think back to my first memories leading to my love of birds and nature, they show me nuances of my behavior that were with me even at a very young age. I am slowly finding that while many of these behaviors were challenging to my juvenile success, many of them have ironically become important controlling forces in my life.

Even before I was old enough for kindergarten, it was very important to me that I felt included in the highly choreographed early morning rituals of my family. Most mornings I would awaken to the loud, echoing click of a distant light switch followed by the creaking of our basement stairs as my dad went for his morning shower. After glancing out the window momentarily, I would roll over and fall back asleep as twilight washed my room in blue.

The creaking of my dad coming back up the stairs usually stirred me from sleep enough to realize my bladder was sending me painful messages to get up. I tried to place my bare feet on the edges of the cold wooden stairs as quietly and quickly as possible, sometimes leaning on the railing and the wall in order to skip up to four steps at a time. To get to the bottom unnoticed was always the goal, and I’m not sure why. Whether walking through the woods alone, or sneaking up on my sisters or a friend in a house, there has always been a special delight in arriving unnoticed. Perhaps it is just the act of surprising people with my presence that proves pleasing, who knows.
Many mornings, just as I got to the bottom of the stairs, my mom would emerge from my parents’ room for her shower. Eyes barely open she would mumble, “morning,” and make her way to the shower in the basement. My mom emerging from sleep has always been rather comical to me, I guess because it is so opposite from the way I have almost always woken up ready to go. Rounding the dining room and the kitchen, the distinct smell of clean skin and my father’s shaving cream filled the air as I approached the bathroom. I would peek around the edge of the door in attempts not to interrupt him as he slid a razor up the right side of his neck with practiced concentration. The ease with which the plastic wand-razor sheered the stubble from his face was almost impossible to believe.

After that moment in the morning, my dad’s days were primarily unknown to me. On some warm mornings I would walk outside with him to say goodbye as he left for work, then walk around the yard or driveway for a few minutes, but most chilly mornings I would stand on the couch looking out the back window to watch him get in his blue Nissan truck, and quickly pull out of the driveway.

The majority of my mornings, or the whole days for that matter, remain unknown to me as well, lost in time. However, at some point my parents realized my affinity for watching birds, or at least to be outdoors watching animals in general. One day while my dad was home for lunch he introduced me to the ubiquitous animal trap. Wherever I have been that people are attempting to catch an animal without a real trap, it is the box, stick, string, and bait that make up the trap.

My dad set me up with a large cardboard box propped up on one side by a short stick with a string attached to it, me holding the other end of it. A seemingly enticing pile of birdseed sat beneath box, and I was set to catch a bird. After showing me how to wait til the bird was completely under the box to pull the stick, my dad left me to my own devices. I sat as motionless as a four year old can, peering out from behind the edge of our log-cabin playhouse, just waiting for the unwary robins that littered my yard to see the beautiful pile of birdseed, openly inviting their presence. Little did I realize that the primary birds who would like to eat the birdseed, like chickadees and titmice, would never venture so far from a tree to examine this odd pile of food in the middle of my yard, while all the robins littering my lawn had interest in only worms, not seeds. Nonetheless I sat there with determination and belief that given enough patience and stillness, a bird would enter the box, but then I had no clue what I would do. Eat it? Play with it? Just let it go? Luckily it never got that far.

When I tell this story to friends, I have taken to telling them I sat still for six hours straight, but the more I think about this story, the more I realize I have no absolute bearing on how long I sat there waiting with assuredness that I would catch a bird. Time meant nothing to me back then beyond when I got to eat. In my memory I did nothing else between the times I ate lunch with my mom and dad that day, and when my dad returned from work that night around dinnertime.

What I do know looking back on this memory is that time spent sitting still like in the ensuing years and even today are ephemeral and rare. If only school were based on watching living animals and being outside, rather than staring at an inanimate chalkboard and equally stoic teacher, my childhood would have proved much less challenging, and much more fruitful I believe.

Aside from numerous schoolyard fights, and wayward distractions in the classroom, releasing all of my boyish energy on the weekends and after school was one of the only constructive ways I found stillness on my own accord. In exhausted moments between hours spent in the fields behind my house managing the jaggers encroaching upon my demolished sumac thicket, chasing birds and squirrels through my yard, or throwing leopard frogs in the middle of the bass pond in my neighbor’s field, I found wonders that froze this raging boy into someone completely different. In these moments I was so different; someone I suppose many people never new existed. And how should anyone have known who I really was on my own accord when all I was to most people was a bright boy who couldn’t sit still in class, couldn’t keep his hands to himself, and was constantly throwing things or doing anything other than what was expected in those sterile, lifeless confines called classrooms? In this manner my love for birds and nature quietly grew into my being, and remained relatively unnoticed. I was just being a kid, something I thought we all did. Little did I know this lifestyle was quietly disappearing amongst most other quiet and well-mannered kids in my classes.

Relics of Importance

2008-02-11T10:40:00.001-07:00

Since leaving high school and my home in York, Pa, I have gradually amassed a shrine of sorts that travels everywhere with me. It consists of items from people and places that hold very important places in my heart, and will forever. Since my freshmen year of college it has grown considerably, but I am still able to look at each piece of it, and remember exactly where or who it is from, and why it is special.

First there is a toucan. This is a rubber toucan that I have had longer than almost anything in my current possession. Its toes have almost all fallen off, so it must lean against something to stand upright. Silas gave this figure to me after a family vacation to Florida or one of the Carolinas.
He has always known how to pick out small gifts that surprise me and show me how much he thinks of me. I remember one time he came to visit my house and saw the toucan on the floor, (since even then it was bad at standing upright, it fell often) and I felt I really let him down when he appeared to be hurt that it was laying on the floor. Since then, I have always felt bad if I see it laying on its side.

There is also a ubiquitous Buddha figure, which for a long time meant nothing to me aside from the memory of a trip I took to Williamsburg, Va, with Silas. We were wandering around a flea market, and I bought this small wooden statue of this Buddha just because it looked attractive to me. I had no clue what Buddhism was, or that it would come to be a majorly transformative force in my life some years later.
Behind the Buddha is a card of a monk that Sara gave me last year for my Bday. In dark times it pushes me into the next day.

The Buddha is sitting upon two river stones I took from Little Pine Creek, one of the places where I began to realize my serious love for the outdoors, my friends, and simple fun. My father first took me to the banks of where I found these stones, and taught me how to fly-fish. I caught one fish in three days. It was a beautiful rainbow. I had no clue what I was doing then. I didn't even know where my fly was when I felt the fish tug. A few years later, Silas and I went fishing there, and we decided to jump in the freezing creek since we hadn't showered in a few days. We screamed and flailed about, and after the stinging subsided, we swam in the crystal clear current, chased trout, and were free. While we warmed up in the sun on the bank, we began skipping stones. This river bank is still the best place I know for skipping stones. One of the funniest memories of my life is our attempts to skip these stones using our non-dominant arms. The awkwardness with which we failed to skip these rocks had us rolling around on the banks.
The small white stone upon the river stones is what I believe is an agate, or an oolid. This stone was sent to me from the shores of Lake Michigan by a dear friend whom I met in Washington, Sarah W. If I remember correctly, these are fossils of small, spherical organisms that became clumped together and fossilized. These stones get rolled around in the surf, becoming polished pebbles of visible fossils.
The piece of bark setting next to this small pebble is very special to me. This bark comes from the remaining cedars of Lebanon. Joelle, a very important friend from Germany sent it to me during one of her visits to her father in Lebanon. The Cedars of Ledanon are some of the oldest, tallest and most ancient and sacred trees in the world. The cedar forests of Lebanon are fabled in the bible, but are long gone due to the same human hunger that scars the Amazon Basin, and the slopes of the Pacific Northwest. This bark is from one of the few remaining sages.

In front of the piece of bark lay two buckeye chestnuts. Late one college night I was walking with some dear friends, Pat and Sarah, along one of the circuits of beautiful lewisburg that had slowly become very familiar to us. We intuitively followed each other aimlessly from street to street, to our favorite victorian houses, spots on the river, and our favorite trees. Each fall we kicked the buckeyes up the road and crunched them beneath our feet. I tasted their bitter tannins, and we talked about how they probably got their names from early taxidermy practices. We held the large chestnuts up to our eyes, imagining them painted like an eyeball and plugged into a trophy buck hanging on someone's living room wall. I kept a few in my pocket one night, so I could cling to those chilly nights when all was perfect.

Next to the Chestnuts is a plug of aspen branch, which I intended to carve into a keychain, but later found it fit perfectly on the shrine. I picked this up when Sara and I first truly met each other. I was visiting Co and the mountains for the first time, and we went on a short hike. This is where I found Sara, and saw the person I felt was hiding beneath the surface all the years we sang together at Bucknell.

Next, there is a white piece of driftwood setting atop a darker piece of driftbark. Both came from the Quilcene Bay, during the first summer I lived in Washington. I would ride my bike down Linger Longer Rd. each day after work, and plunge into the salty water, swim with a lone seal, or catch crabs, and some days I would sift through the driftwood, amazed at the designs nature could make with water, wood, and stone. These pieces will stay with me forever I hope. The dark piece of bark came from when I finally returned to Quilcene after being away for several years.

Then there is a sage smudge made by Sara. After I visited her that first summer in Co, and remarked over my love for Sage, she later sent me this after we had finally began dating. It hung in my car for awhile, and now travels from place to place with me. Relics from the beginning of Love are so latent with nostalgia.

Behind the sage smudge is a picture of Peter, during his time in The Gambia, Africa. My time spent with Peter was so short-lived, yet his friendship was/is so uniquely touching and important in my life. I look forward with hope that we will live together again some day.

I wonder what will be next. There are a few places and friends who are not represented in this shrine, and while you are very important to me, it gives me hope that there are memories to come in places we have yet to be to add to this shrine.

Early Life-Part Three, Finding Nature

2008-02-10T13:20:00.002-07:00

After Summer ended and second grade brought me back indoors, I was lucky to see another praying mantis egg. In a small patch of woods behind my house, I was waging a war that had been going on for several years now. Within the edge of the woods was a densely overgrown thicket of jaggers, which I much later learned were more commonly called briars. However, between two twelve-foot tall patches of jaggers there was a small passage through which I could enter into a small forest of sumac, and this is where I went wild. What started as a mere interest in helping my dad control our yard by knocking the tops of dandelions with small sticks, as though I was beheading someone, quickly grew into a full blown obsession for running through fields with a specially picked stick. A swath of shredded weeds would lay behind me, and I felt victorious as though I had just waded through a sea of warriors, having laid waste to them all.

I don’t recall ever being given a reason to hide this activity from my parents, but I can’t ever remember them being present when I would unleash such a jubilant rage. There was always a sense of secrecy to these slaughters, and this is exactly what I found in the sumac, well-hidden between the towering jagger bushes.
From the time I was allowed to walk the forests behind my house as early as three years old, I remember the worrying that came with the word poison ivy. There was some bad plant in the woods that could really hurt me, and I had to be very wary of it. At some point, I also learned of something called poison sumac, and I was convinced that my secret forest of sumac was just this enemy.
I went through many of the best sticks while destroying this sumac forest. These were not mere weeds in a field; these towering spindles of sumac blurred the definition between shrub and tree. Some of the stalks were almost the size of my arms, yet I was determined to leave nothing. Soon, I found an unused broomstick in our garage, and felt I had found the best stick of them all. No matter how hard I slashed through the sumac, the broomstick would not give. This is how it went for many seasons, and when the entire sumac forest had been raised to the ground, I would turn to the encroaching jaggers and smoothly shear off all the brighter green new growth protruding from the bushes. My fort was complete. Here I was alone and unknown within a natural fortress. I even began to burrow tunnels beneath the jagger bushes, where I could lay when the sun had made my fortress too hot. I would watch black specks fly past overhead, and remain motionless when sparrows, catbirds, and mockingbirds would creep through the bush, seeking insects.
On a warm Saturday after helping my dad with yard work, I retired to my fort, and resumed the carnage. My broomstick was stained a deep green from months of use. I was leaning against it for a rest, when I noticed a brown piece of Styrofoam wrapped around a jagger shoot I had just separated from the bush. I picked it up slowly, realizing what I had just found. I squeezed it gently, and it indeed felt like Styrofoam, but with a hard core.
Monday morning, my teacher humored my interests, and allowed me to bring the egg into class for all to see, as well as to give it a shelter for when the time came to hatch. Every day, I came into class, inspecting the egg and the glass cage for some change, but there was none. My hope for the egg’s hatching became a distant thought, the way one dreams of what they may get for Christmas when it is still months away.
One morning, while all the students were waiting in the gymnasium for the day to start, my teacher entered the cloud of students and motioned for me, smiling.
“Come, I have to show you something,” she said quietly with controlled excitement.
I felt a little sickness tighten in my stomach. It was all to common for me to be pulled away from the students for a scolding, or to be sent to the principal’s office for something I had done the previous day. Whether it was perpetrating what I thought was a playful fight on the playground, or riding my bike to school as a seven year old, the school always seemed to have problems with my actions. However, through some stroke of luck, this was not the case this morning. We rounded the corner to the glass cage and it seemed to be crawling with a small green mold, as though overnight mold had infested the cage.
“I was just bout to throw it away this morning, when I looked in and saw everything moving. They Hatched!” Mrs. Ritts exclaimed to me.
I couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t a mold at all; rather hundreds of praying mantis babies no bigger than my pinky nail covered every surface of the cage. Life had existed within that egg the whole time! After the class had a day or two to inspect the offspring, we set them all loose in a field outside the school, and I took a handful home to foster on my own.
A month later, three of them remained alive, now about half the size of my thumb. I had spent hours watching them slink around the large canning jar, climbing sticks, falling from the sides of the glass, and periodically batting at each other when they came face to face. I wasn’t sure what they needed to eat anymore, for all the ants I had placed in the jar with them had died strewn about the dirt uneaten. So, I released them into my father’s iris bushes outside, and turned my interests to starting my own any colony from the many ants that frequented our flowerbeds. A week later as I perused the beautiful indigo blossoms where I had released the juvenile mantises, I found one, apparently healthy, and much larger already. If you have never seen a praying mantis turn its head and stare straight at you through its pearly green compound eyes, it is an eerily familiar sight, and I find it hard not to impart some sense of intelligence upon that stare.

Early Life-Part Two, Special Things Hide Outside

2008-02-06T10:47:00.000-07:00

My fondness of reading didn’t last very long. Not long after I began to read, my family began watching much more TV together. I remember for a long time the TV was always turned off when it was time to eat together. We sat around the table, and talked, and enjoyed our meal. However, shortly after first grade, while it had usually only been a treat to be allowed to eat out dinner while laying on the floor of our living room, it became increasingly common for my parents to take their dinner to the couches, and for us kids to lay on the floor and watch shows like the Simpsons and McGuiver while eating dinner.

After finishing dinner, I would lay my plate in the sink, and sleek onto my mothers lap. Later, after I was too large for her lap, I would squeeze onto the very edge of the chair. This persisted well through elementary school, and completely replaced the ephemeral time I spent reading to my parents. Now the amount of contact I experienced with my parents was not dependent on my reading skills, and my skepticism of reading grew. Books seemed useless to me unless they were explaining some picture in the book of a frog laying eggs, or explaining how the planets of the solar system orbit the sun.

Slowly, science books became the only books I would read in school. It seemed the books for every other topic in school were a waste of time. The teachers seemed to always be giving us all the correct answers we needed to get good grades, and all we had to do was listen to them. But in these books, I found wonders the teachers never talked about. I found things I later learned they barely understood themselves. This is what brought me to the woods.

I was always exploring as a child. Much later in life, while in high school and a few times during college when I remarked to my mom about TV shows all of my friends were familiar with and I was not, or voiced concern, (I guess sometimes pride as well) over how other kids couldn’t climb a tree or catch a frog like I could my mom stated with motherly resolution, “Beej, that’s cause you were always outside. You never wanted to do anything else, you just wanted to be outside.”

Well, I guess it was always clear to me that I wanted to be outside, but I hadn’t entertained the possibility that this wasn’t the case for each and every kid I knew. I still have a tough time finding that other people don’t feel the same about this. Anyways, this was about the time when I found out teachers in a class room would teach you about things they had never witnessed on their own.

The summer before second grade, I was helping my grandmother trim some bushes outside of her house in Chambersburg. The summers were hot, so we got up and worked in the morning, and then sipped sweating glasses of sugary sun-made iced tea in the afternoon. One day my grand mother paused and yelled as she bent closer to a bush she was shearing.
“Oh Beej, come here quick, come look at this,” she exclaimed in the same ascending high pitched voice my mom used when she got excited about something.
I dropped the juniper branches I was carrying that smelled of cat piss, and ran over. I peered into a dark hole where no branches were growing upon this dense evergreen tree, and looking up at me was a pale green insect, nothing like I had ever seen.
This was no beetle, no fly, and no ant I later learned how to burn with a magnifying glass my grand mother gave me for Christmas.
“This is a praying mantis,” she said softly, slowing down and speaking very clearly as she said its name, “they are very special because they eat all the bad flies in these bushes. See how it looks like its prayin,” she questioned, folding her hands like she was praying too, “I just think they’re the dearest things.”

I am not sure I had any idea what bad flies did in bushes, but the fact that my grand mother introduced such a thing to me with such softness and clarity marked this insect to me as forever special. To this day I still feel worse about accidentally stepping on one large female I was trying to catch than I do about anything else I have ever killed. I suppose that was one of the first times I learned that very special things hid outside, and they could be found everywhere.

It was also this summer that I learned what a praying mantis egg was. Again, in similar circumstances, my grandmother called me over with excitement to a large shrub she had been shearing, and she pointed to a small brown piece of Styrofoam about the size of a ping-pong ball.
“When it is time for this to hatch, it will open up and hundreds of little babies will come out,” my grandmother whispered to me with quieted importance.
I had trouble picturing hundreds of babies, miniature versions of what I had seen just a few days before, emerging from such a small thing.

Early Life - Part 1, Learning to Read

2008-01-25T09:28:00.001-07:00

Learning to Read
1/25/08
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While I was home during Christmas, it was great to spend so much time with my family. Although home is mostly the same when I go home, I witnessed subtle changes, one of which returned me to my childhood momentarily.

I was leaving to meet up with my friends, and my mom was sitting at the computer with my niece on her lap. Mackenzie was pounding on the keys, and my mom was urging her not to be so hard on them.

“What’s that,” Mackenzie would demand with a smile as she pushed her finger to the computer screen. My mom would try to sound out a word if there was a semblance of one, sometimes she would tell her to keep typing.

My mother used to do this with me. She would feed a sheet of paper into the typewriter, and allow me to lay waste to the sheet as my hands danced across the keys as though it were a piano of innumerable notes. At first, I remember seeing if I could type too fast for the machine. I felt joy in managing to stop its keys. I liked looking at the sweeping sinuous designs the hammer arms made as they overlapped each other in a rushed tangle instead of meeting the paper and recoiling in a blink as they were supposed to.

I remember one of these days only clearly enough to know it wasn’t long after my family moved across the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, from Lancaster county, home of the Amish, to York county, home of the racists. I was somewhere between three and four years old, old enough that I was speaking often, and beginning to only vaguely understand the symbolic relationship of all the signs my parents reacted to as if someone was speaking to them while driving me around in the car. I slowly began to understand that words were made up of these symbols called letters, and that all these letters could be arranged by my fingers dancing across the keyboard of a type writer, and from this came words, the same words I could speak!

After I was done, I would get up from the cold spare bedroom floor, and take the sheet of my writing to my mother to inspect for words. On this day I remember becoming particularly interested in what I later learned to be the letter q, and it covered the majority of my page, sometimes for several unwavering lines at once. My mom sat in her chair, tracing each line with her finger, as if feeling for a word. I eagerly watched the reflection of the paper in her glasses, her eyes rolling back and forth as though she might be dizzy.

“Well, here’s the word saw,” she said pointing to an amorphous jumble of letters on the page, “you know, like sawing a tree down?”

She made a motion with her arm, swinging back and forth, and I could see her arm sawing into a tree.

“Ohh,” I said slowly, taking the paper from her hands and walking out of the room. I sat in the spare bedroom, and stared at the word, wondering what made those letters mean the same thing as what we called a saw. A few minutes later I had come to no conclusions, and returned to my mom, asking her to find more words.

“That’s it,” she said resolutely, “that is the only word on the page.”

“What?”

“That’s it beej,” she said again a little softer this time as she handed the paper back to me. I walked back into the room, and soon took to making more pages of typing. I don’t clearly remember how often I did this, but I can remember repeating these actions with my mom many times, and from this I began to recognize street signs, and understand worlds flying across the TV screen.

This type of learning was much different from what I was soon to be subject to. Everyone was so excited about learning how to read. Everyone was to begin learning how to read formally in school in first grade. I remember beginning first grade already after two years of school. I approached the air of importance that seemed to float about learning how to read a bit skeptically, yet I was excited to feel the same pleasure and satisfaction that my parents shared with my older sisters when they displayed their new talents at reading during school. This was a period of time in my life when being held by my parents was still simply the most pleasurable aspect of life, and learning to read seemed to provide another method to get them to hold me. I quickly found that I could get my parents to hold me in their arms a few more times a week if I could read a few sentences from a book we had spent weeks on at school.

2008-01-21T16:37:00.000-07:00

"Yeah, it's so great that it is a bluebird day, maybe we will get up there clear of clouds and wind," I said confidently looking towards the divide, "it would be great if the kids could get a close view of the divide." Mary nods in agreement, as we drive eagerly out of lyons and into the foothills, heading towards Rocky Mountain National Park.

However, forty minutes later, as we rounded one of the final corners approaching the Park in Estes, a tell-tale Chinook wall hovers above the Divide, periodically dropping between exposing movements, lifting to reveal a coating of fresh white powder. Mary and I smirk at each other with lips taught, both of us realizing we will not be greeted by glistening snow; rather a different world awaited us, only twenty minutes further into the mountains.

Squinting into the morning sun as we continued down the main street of Estes, I smirked at hearing the kids comment over all of the stores lining the road, knowing how different this quaint-looking road would look just several months later, clouded with hundreds of tourists, searching to buy their knick-knack, whose soul meaning it was to prove their momentary existence in Estes Park, Colorado; Grand Gateway to the Rockies.

I showed the park entrance attendant our papers, and rolled on as the kids excitedly pounded on their legs for one of our adult volunteers, celebrating his first entrance into RMNP.

"Gee! There's not much snow," A few of them commented at the lack of snow here at almost 8000 feet elevation.
"Yeah," I mumbled back to them in agreement, worrying over the spectacle of 10 kids' disappointment, excited to go snowshoeing in the National Park only to arrive to dry, wind-blown trails void of snow.

I glared at the snow hopefully after every turn as we wound higher into the Park. After several miles, my hope began to wane as I stared at continuous patches of open forest floor, until finally the sun went gray as we passed into pencil-thin subalpine forests thrashing wildly in the wind. Droves of snow flew past us, the sky grew whiter as the sun disappeared, and the kids began to remark over the 4 foot banks of snow flanking the winding road.

"Alright, it's gonna be really windy out there, and it's probably gonna be uncomfortably cold, we need to get ready in the van, so when we get out into that wind, we can get our snowshoes on and get on the trail quickly, where the wind isn't as crazy," as I spoke a few kids dazed out, turning their heads to watch a family leaning against the freezing wind, grimacing as they donned their skis and backpacks.

Snow and freezing wind blasted into the van as the first kids threw open the doors to hop out. Snow swirled, and quickly began piling atop the van seats. Quickly we pulled snowshoes from the back of the van, and helped the kids attach them to their feet. Snow undulated in dancing tendrils around us and down the road. Cold wind and snow found the crevices between our hats and coats, chilling our neck. Slowly, each kid successfully attached their snowshoes and migrated to the relative shelter of a pavilion next to the forest, waiting for everyone to get ready.

Twenty minutes later, I tightened the final straps to the last kid. We hurried into the forest, and around the corner to the edge of the lake for a picture, and here the kids felt the true depth of Winter breathe into every exposing crevice of their clothing, making them shiver, wide-eyed in the realization of real Rocky Mountain winter cold. The group feigned masculine poses of triumph over the winter while I snapped a few shots with my camera, before running off of the frozen lake back into the shelter of the dense trees.

Hiking into the woods, Mary and I giggled, realizing quickly how little distance the group would cover together. In just a few hundred yards, we had to stop once to reattach a snowshoe, and again to change wet cotton socks. While waiting, we played a game of Lynx and Hare. I took off my snowshoes to become the lynx, while everyone else ran from me, as though they were snowshoe hares. Having never played this game, I thought it might be possible, or even easy to chase down each hare, encumbered by their large and buoyant feet. This was not the case. Two steps off the trail, my right foot disappeared up to my hip into the snow, and I felt no ground beneath it. Struggling free and standing upright again, I made it two more steps until my left foot disappeared as well, and this is how the game ensued until the socks were changed, and we continued.

Half a mile from the trailhead, we stumbled against the wind onto the frozen surface of small Nymph Lake. As the kids slowly filed out of the forest towards us, Mary and I decided this was a good place for lunch, as well as a turn around point. The temperature was hovering just above the 0 degree mark, and with a constant driving wind stinging snow into our faces, this was much, much colder than I had felt in a very long time, perhaps ever.

"Alright! Let's go into the trees and get some lunch," I yelled into the wind around the circle of kids. We lumbered into the trees, and fell back in delight, as the snow welcomed us with a cushioned hand, creating makeshift lazy-boys as our butts created perfect-fitting depressions to sit in. I inspected the kids as they sat down, finding all of them ecstatic with the day so far. Even the cold and shivering ones seemed to be glibly restraining their discomfort for the better enjoyment of the group. I pulled a frozen raspberry jam and almond butter tortilla out of my backpack and ate, watching to see what interesting lunches the kids had brought from home. My tortilla was gone far too quickly, and I felt too cold to dig the rest of my many grain oatmeal from my backpack, so I watched the kids eagerly, secretly hoping some of them had brought too much food to eat alone.

A plump doug squirrel hopped through the snow from tree to tree, until it was an arm's length away peering nervously from behind the tree, searching for an outstretched hand offering food. I knocked on the other side of tree, and the squirrel quickly ran up the tree, flinging itself through trees, and quickly descending next to others in the group, seeking help in this bitter winter forest it calls home. After only a minute or two of no luck, it returned to the treetops, and glided away from us like a bird, towards another group of people up the hill. For a few moments, I felt the plight of the squirrel as it stared at me from the other side of the tree, momentarily exposing itself to inspect my outstretched hand, in hoped of salvation. It lingered only for a moment, anchored to faith in our good nature.

There was only wind. The trees danced above us, swaying to a rhythm that will seldom lapse for another three months. The kids smiled at each other as they hurriedly ate their lunches, some still staring into the treetops, hoping the squirrel would return.

As we made a shortcut across the lake, thw wind blew so fiercely that I could not see others only twenty feet in front of me. As we emerged from the trail, we made straight for the shelter of the van. Not one of us turned to give a glimpse back at what we had just experienced. Barely an hour we explored the haunts of the subalpine winter forest, yet it sent all of us reeling back to the comfort of a steel cage and engine that would carry us back into Estes Park, where we peered back into the mountains out a sunny window, slowly sipping peppermint-cocoa warmth back into our body.

Waiting for the Solstice

2007-12-19T08:08:00.000-07:00

The snow hardens the tough rubber of my boots as I hike through the snow, and unless I am hiking rather vigorously with my thickest socks on, the chill seeps into my feet, residing for hours. As the sun slowly washes the snow away over days, shovels work on by piling heaps of snow at the base of sleeping trees on the Pearl St. Mall. On overcast days, cold blue light saturates, and photos carry the indelible signature of the season. Grainy and blue, I become frustrated with the results of freezing fingers and stinging winds.

This is the season I find myself sitting on a hassock in the corner of my apartment for an extra thirty minutes after lunch, soaking in the midday sun as I inspect my plants doing the same. Hugging my guitar to my chest, I rest my cheek on the curved body, closing my eyes toward the sun, tapping soft rhythms of snow melting from the roof, and rhythms of my restlessness.

Songs that come from lunch return some content to my chest, and I open the window halfway to let some sound out to my neighbors, in hopes there is one walking about who may find one of these songs resonate with a similar sentiment in which it was created.

Between songs I rest my cheek back on the side of my guitar, waiting for a new rhythm to move my fingers into song. I sing and shout for awhile, and finally when I rest my cheek on my guitar and hear nothing, just black silence, I return my guitar to its black velvet case, and ride my bike back to work.

While the fall broke me down, the coming of Winter has built me back up. As I finally feel rare instances of consistence in my work, my emotions, etc, I feel restless all the same. Every night I awake looking into the darkness, hoping to find faint hints of light whispering the coming day into my eyes. I laid in bed last night thinking how nice it would be to return home on the shortest day of the year - a homecoming in the quiet night of the year. A week later, I will return to Boulder, prepared to celebrate the coming of a new calendar year, awakening every day to new light, greeting the waxing sun, each day bringing us closer to the awakening of Spring.

Lavender

2007-12-14T09:52:00.000-07:00

I was reading a college friend's blog this morning while watching others pass around me in Book End Cafe on Pearl St. Mall, and he used a quote that has landed me found several times in my life:

Not till we are lost, in other words not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
— Henry Thoreau

Pat moved on to talk about his realization of need for his prose and writing to be a celebration of his connections to others, not himself as an island . This thought immediately crumbled and washed away many thoughts of mine behind my blog as well. While I seek to find the truth, beauty, and clarity in this world, I often draw on self-realization, which normally have to do with the natural world surrounding me, and while I hope that my reflections and observations will encourage others seek out similar observations, I am somehow failing to truly encourage others to seek out such beauty, truth and clarity for themselves.

No one's writing is an island, for we all are a product of our environment. We are continually being reinvented, replenished, redefined by everyone that surrounds us, and it is wrong for me to treat my writing with such ownership. It has indeed remained my Ego Island for the past months.

And while I read Pat's journal and distractedly looked around to observe the masses swirling around me, the aroma of lavender invaded. I am obsessed with this smell. I have not yet figured out if this obsession has a deep seed in my childhood, for this scent never wafted the forests of Pennsylvania, yet out here in Boulder it is common for someone to pass by leaving an organically fragrant plume of lavender in their wake.

My ties to this scent may have developed recently from a massage oil Sara and I have, but I do not yet know. All I know is that when I smell this scent, I am completely distracted as though this scent is a song from the sirens to my sinuses. There is a carnal depth within this scent that hints at a certain closeness to all my surroundings, as if I was at once lying in bed with all of my surroundings. My eyes dart around as my nose tests the air like some bird dog seeking out the source, and I am drawn to that person, plant, or listless room decoration as though under a psychedelic haze, I believe there is some distant connection I must come to understand between us. Yet, just as the scent dissipates I return to awareness of my surroundings, no longer feeling the unity within the previous moment.

Perhaps this helps me realize why Sara and I recently bought a lavender oil to put on ourselves each day. I want to constantly smell this oil, if only to continually flirt within these feelings of deeper connection to my surroundings, and hopefully some way which I have yet to realize, this will help what I write to become more inclusive.

Building Bikes

2007-11-08T20:48:00.000-07:00

My new fixed gear bike that I made at Community Cycles:

This was built from an old Nishiki frame I picked up in the planning process. Everything else for this project, excepting the bar end brake, was obtained from and assembled at Community Cycles.

I ground down the red frame using a hand grinder, first with a wire brush, then with a polishing disk, and the way it finally shined made me sing through my dust mask.

I used a dremel tool to draw in a mountain range across the top tube. After all, they are at the heart of the reason I am living here in the first place.

After that, I taped off the tubes, so I could paint the lugwork. After the lugwork was painted green, I clear coated the whole frame several times before assembling the whole bike.

Like Dominoes

2007-11-07T07:08:00.000-07:00

Here are the notes from a hike this past weekend up in Allenspark, on the edge of the Rocky Mountain National Park, less than a mile through the woods from where Sara and I used to live last year. Hopefully, I will be able to upload some images to it in the coming week or so.

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Standing on the edge of a dry streambed only two feet wide, my eyes followed dusty elk and moose prints along a heavily used trail from dry yellow aspen and grass fields across the streambed, into the darker conifer forest. Fir trees had long ago taken over the lower land adjoining the perennial spring, leaving the drier Ponderosa stands to take over the slopes uphill from the stream.
As I followed each print along the trail into the forest, the brighter straw color of a freshly snapped aspen trunk caught my eye. Some storm had snapped the twenty, maybe thirty year old off at chest level, just above a large woodpecker hole. After learning how to find flying squirrels in the woods of Pennsylvania during wandering sessions with friends in college, I have since been unable to resist the urge to tap on every tree I see that has a cavity hole along its trunk. Approaching the tree, I noticed brown lumps in the large cavity that looked like oversized elk droppings. Fishing one out of the hole, I was clueless as to what this wrinkly walnut sized brown sponge was until I thought of all the squirrels I noticed carrying mushrooms around this fall. As truffle flashed through my mind, I held the little brown knuckle up to my stuffy nose and took a whiff. It smelled like almond syrup. I looked for bite marks, and bit a spot where there were none. It was dry and spongy, but had a barely noticeable pleasant taste. Thinking of all of the squirrels I saw carrying poisonous Amanitas this fall, I spit it out.
Giggling over my find, I reached back into the cavity; sounding for the depth of this squirrels cache. I couldn’t feel the bottom, but based on the volume of most larger woodpecker’s nests, I guess there was about three quarters of a gallon of truffles in this single dead aspen. I looked around for a minute, as if something else amazing might pop out of the woods, and walked on resuming my search for a well-used elk crossing close to water where I might be able to hunt this winter.
I followed several elk and moose trails into the woods, trying to stick to prints that were only a day old. However, I kept returning to the streambed, unhappy with the amount of travel any of the crossings were getting. I finally arrived downstream to where the spring consistently flowed year round, and pausing at the bottom of one steep embankment to admire a larger fir whose large roots were dipping into the spring, I noticed a basketball size grass nest perched atop the end of one branch some fifteen feet above the ground. Having been spoiled by the aesthetic oak and maple trees of the east, I rarely climb conifer trees, but decided it was time. And I needed a break from searching for a reliable creek crossing. I reached up into the tree, and stepping upon branches an inch or two thick, I began to wriggle my way through the branches.
Taking a break to wipe some bark from my eyes, I noticed a large, white mushroom, with a whitish yellow cap nestled amidst a tuft of needle next to me. A foot away I noticed a smaller, black and yellow mushroom in the next tuft of needles. I followed the branch to its terminal bud, and looked around me to see almost every tuft of needles had at least one mushroom laying within it, bobbing in the cold, dry wind from the divide, which was maybe four miles away. I climbed further, finding that I was surrounded by hundreds of mushrooms. Taking a quick survey, I could count at least five different species of mushrooms, most of which I later found to be Russula,, many of which are edible to humans as well.
By the time I had arrived at the nest it seemed moot to inspect it, since it was apparent this was one of the nests of the squirrel, or family of squirrels, who inhabited this tree, and covered it with their winter stash of dried mushrooms. I gave the branch a shake, hoping a disgruntled squirrel may take a look from inside. After a second uneventful shake, I climbed further up the tree to a few very large masses of mistletoe coming from the trunk of this fir, perhaps almost 20 feet above the ground. There seemed to be many more mushrooms on the branches closer to the mistletoe, and as I climbed closer I noticed this dense tangle of branches were lined with grass. It was full of mushrooms. From the largest cavity, I could have filled a five-gallon bucket. I grabbed a representative of the two most common mushrooms, and dropped them down to the ground by my pack to id them later at home. I inspected a few more nests within the mistletoe, and clung to the swaying tree for a minute, listening to the wind rippling down through the valley, and smirked as it all came together; from the arrangement of the needles on the branch, to the parasitic mistletoe that sprouted like a preeminent tombstone from its host’s trunk, everything in the near silence of the wind whispered perfection through the trees.
The needles themselves, arranged in a spiral along three-inch twigs that reach up like a supplicant’s hand, perfectly cradle the delicate mushrooms. Arranged about every foot or so, these tufts provide a diligent pine squirrel with the pre-organized matrix along which they can meticulously fill the branches with mushrooms. Larger fungi seemed to be placed closer to the trunk of the tree, while smaller, less valuable pieces of fungi were placed closer to the ends of the branches, closer to the wind.
Mistletoe is a parasite. Once it has infiltrated the bark of a tree, death for the tree begins. While many forest managers seek to remove this pest from valuable stands of wood, this organism naturally selects weaker individuals who are more susceptible to its sticky seeds. Thus, the oldest trees in the forest exemplify those with the greatest tolerance to such parasites. This old fir I was perched within, was one of these such trees. The oldest water loving fir along the whole stretch of stream I had found, and here above me were the largest bunches of mistletoe I had ever seen. The fir showed no signs of distress to me, and I would assume many of its progeny stood solidly below prepared to take its place when the mistletoe exacted its toll.
While we classify mistletoe as a pest, and our human emotions and logic lead us to believe it as a bad thing, without the mistletoe’s presence, one harsh winter could, years down the road, mean a sooner death for this fir tree than the mistletoe promises. Let me explain.
Squirrels depend on the mistletoe to hold their winter’s cache of mushrooms. Just as the fir needles provide the perfect drying rack for a portion of the pine squirrel’s booty, these large tangles of mistletoe are essentially large drying baskets, which allow all of the mushrooms cached here to dry quickly before molding of decomposing. Having such a huge supply of mushrooms at the structural center of the tree ensures that even amidst the roughest winter storms, which may strip all of the mushrooms from the fir branches, these squirrels will still have a hardy supply of fungi just a few branches away. Ok, so what part do the mushrooms play?
Scientists are continually learning that the symbiosis existing between fungus and trees is not just a helping hand to each of these organisms’ well being. It is vital to their existence. The thread-like hyphae of fungus, which are similar to plant roots, spread through the soil, and attach to tree roots when they encounter them. At these sites, a partnership is formed in which the trees provide carbon to the fungus, while the fungus provides water, minerals, and protection against disease pathogens. This symbiosis in effect extends their own resource network exponentially, while helping out their neighbor by sharing excess goods. So, back to the mistletoe.
In the late summer and fall months when squirrels hurriedly collect and dry their winter food stores of fungus, the open gills of the mushrooms dangling from the squirrel’s mouth spread millions of spores across the forest floor, some of which will slowly found new colonies of fungus throughout the forest, which will go on to help ensure the health of the trees creating the forest. Remove one piece of the puzzle and a trophic cascade begins.
Without the mistletoe to maintain the most important mass of the squirrel’s winter diet, the squirrels would not make it through the winter. Where squirrels disappear from patches of the forest, the mushrooms no longer have their “bees” to sew their seeds. A few seasons later, the soils slowly become depleted of hyphae, and suddenly the trees have a tougher time receiving their most important nutrients and water from the soil. So, during the most important time of the summer when they usually focus on creating sugars to bide them through the winter, these trees must allot their energies to growing more extensive root systems to seek out these nutrients. Come wintertime, these trees are often more at risk of succumbing to a rough or longer winter. Finally, a dead conifer tree cannot continue to feed its parasitic mistletoe. In this way, nature exhibits a perfect give and take method of existence in which one organism depends on others to fulfill their weaknesses, while they fulfill another’s.