Category: Essays

(A bit late, but here is an old posting from Connecticut, in early February of this year…)

There was a full moon a few nights ago, and the snow in our backyard late that night glowed in a way that was almost phosphorescent, and formed haunting shadows of trees on the smooth white surface.

The latest theories say that the stuff of the moon was once the outer crust of the early earth, but was blasted off by a massive collision with another planet the size of Mars. Less than a billion years later life began on earth, and from that time on has survived hundreds of other catastrophic collisions, the most recent big ones being a ten-mile wide asteroid around 250 million years ago, which blasted out a crater almost 300 miles wide and wiped out 90 percent of all life on earth, and then a much much smaller one about 60 million years ago which killed off most of the dinosaurs and other land-based creatures on earth…

…with the exception of a few little shrew-like mammals that later sprung back and evolved, so Darwin says, into dogs, cats, lemurs… and human beings. That of course was not the end of the story. For example, the people of the Clovis culture lived here in North America just 12 thousand years ago but were suddenly wiped out, along with woolly mammoths and other creatures, all at once. A strange layer of burned ground found in Clovis-related sites makes many researchers proposes that a huge cluster of comets hit the atmosphere and set the entire northern continent on fire, and everyone on it. And yet a few survived…

There really is no more debate about evolution among serious scientists. Evolution is not merely one of several competing alternative “theories”. Darwin’s essential hypothesis about the origin of new species is not only supported by its ability to explain observations, but (as the true test of a scientific theory) has also made predictions — predictions which alternative hypotheses would not have been able to make — and these predictions were later verified. This is an interesting fact that I only learned recently while Gigi and I were once again out at the Yale Peabody Museum. In the section on early man, there were some letters between Darwin and some paleoanthropologists, about some recent fossils of man-like ape creatures found in northern America. If the theory of evolution were true, they concluded, the migration patterns of humans would lead one to predict that they should find ape-like fossils much closer and more similar to humans near where all major migrations appear to have begun: in Africa.

Much later, these predictions were proved correct, as were many others, such as the thousands of long-dead “missing links”, that evolution predicted would be found between hundreds of similar species still alive today.

I guess the point of all this is that by comparison with 10 mile wide asteroid collisions, the little economic downturn we are facing in the current microsecond of geological time is very unlikely to have a lasting impact. We will learn, adapt (or be replaced). Darwin, who was born 200 years ago this year, was right. As the character Malcolm (played by Jeff Goldbloom) said in the movie Jurassic Park, “Life finds a way.”

March roars in like a lion, and out like a lamb.

In Los Angeles, the month of March is distinguished from the other months of the year by the sudden and unexplained appearance of chocolate bunnies and marshmallow peeps in grocery stores. Rabbits and Chickens. That’s about it. Lions and lambs remained exotic creatures that lived in Africa and the Scottish highlands, or in the latter case sometimes grilled and served with couscous at Moroccan restaurants.

The Lion in Winter

That said, let’s talk about where we live now. On the last day of February we were in the middle of what we had been warned was a “false spring”. Sure felt like spring to me; so much so that for the first time in over two months I had no qualms about going out for a walk through the farm without a jacket and three layers of insulation (and, for that matter, snow shoes). I’d been trying to collect pictures of the same locations in different times of the year so I brought my camera to get some shots of the farmland, and this picture here of Gigi contemplating the view of the house from the creek. We didn’t need our waterproof boots as all the snow had long ago melted, and though the sky was partly cloudy the ground was warm and dry.

The first day of March had been predicted to involve a sudden change, which took the form of a blizzard. A cold front had moved down from Canada, and the acoustics of this area are such that the wind literally roared through the trees; it was loud enough that you could hear the wind coming from miles away, as it rolled up and over the hills.

After three months of sub-freezing temperatures I was just now starting to get the hang of building fires in the (closed) fireplace. The owners had about half a cord of firewood behind the shed, and about once a week when the snow had cleared a bit we went out with a wheel-barrow to haul some of the logs to the covered front porch, where they could dry out before we pull them in to the house. We had tried using the little fire-starter bricks and followed their directions for stacking the logs, but it never worked too well. Later we tried priming the system with a “Presto” log but after a few days of that we started developing a smokers cough. Finally I remembered something that Frank Lloyd Wright used to do based on his theory that logs, like trees, burn better in their natural position — which is vertical. I arranged three logs in a tripod formation and put a starter beneath them. Whoosh. Guess I should have stuck it out in Boy Scouts just a bit longer to get past Tenderfoot.

The next day the wind passed and the air went still, and the snow once again began to fall. First in small flakes and fast-falling rain, but within the hour the air had cooled further and the snow was now in large fluffy dandelion formations that glided down slow but piled up fast. I went out to get a few shots but didn’t have much time as there was more snow on the way. The birds left their mark on the picnic table and scrambled to peck out more birdseed before flying back into the spruce trees and brush for shelter.

By the end of the second day over a foot of snow had fallen, and once again our picnic table out back had a pure white six-foot long twinkie sitting on top of it. Had to put on my jacket again, along with waterproof boots, and the snow shoes, and the thick gloves, and went out get a few more shots of the same area. The snow surrounding the bird feeder was a popular spot, and was quickly trampled down by all the birds looking for food, such as one of our two cardinals and a dark eyed junko, shown here.

The Ides of March: Robins

The snow did not last long. By the end of the first week it had almost completely melted, by which time robins had begun to appear. I never realized until watching a few of these red birds stalk each other that the old song about the red red robin was based on the bird’s behavior. Their staccato walk consists of a set of three or four steps, after which they stop and perk their heads up, sometimes tilting them slightly as if listening for worms before — bobbing — back down again. The iBird app on my iPhone informs me that their song really is described as “cheer up, cheer up”. Onomatopoetic.

Going Gently

Meanwhile, the garden — which for the last two months had been dead and covered in a white varnish of snow — had begun to show signs of life in the form of narrow green shoots, that came up through the snow so fast that they pierced some of the old maple leaves left over from the Fall. By the end of the month the shoots were in full bloom, in the form of yellow and white daffodils as well as tiny purple flowers that appeared to be some form of tulip.

Now it is April and we haven’t seen birds at the bird feeder for days. Gigi thinks that they have found better food elsewhere, but I wondering if perhaps they haven’t begun nesting or found some other season-appropriate … activities. Indeed, we finally spotted a dozen or more of the tiny chickadees and titmice under a large sheltering bush by the side of the house. Some of the birds had grown quite fat (or more likely “with egg”) and looked to be settling in among the underbrush for a nice long hatch. Even the cardinal and some of the robins would disappear into the dark bush every now and then, making the bush seem more like a nightclub than a breeding ground (to which some may argue, what’s the difference?)

High Wire Squirrels

The squirrels spent much of the month honing their high-wire acts, in the form of their repeated assaults upon the bird feeder. Fortunately, the small bird house that hangs between the feeder and the tree was unoccupied. Since that time I have reinforced the bird house hanger so that it can at least sustain the full weight of an adult but clumsy squirrel, from a drop of eight inches. Not too long after that a song wren began to take interest in the new safety features of the little house, seen here inspecting the property under the watchful gaze of a small downy woodpecker.

In any case, here below you may see a video, capturing for the record the event that prompted me to improve the bird house infrastructure:

[youtube]0%788z5lz2%2d_M[/youtube]

Spent about half the day on Sunday digging out from the most recent snowstorm, armed with snow shovels, ice blowers, salt and gravel. So, I had a lot of time to think about snow, ice and water in its various forms.

It took a while for the ingredients of water to appear on the scene in this floating world. The protons that go into making the “core” of Hydrogen appeared first, about a millionth of a second after the start of the Big Bang, when the soup of quarks had cooled enough to congeal into protons (don’t you hate it when your quark soup does that?). It took another four hundred thousand years for the protons to combine with electrons, which orbit around them to form the tiny little solar system we call a Hydrogen atom.

The other ingredient in water, Oxygen, was a lot more tricky. You have to pack eight protons together closely to make the core of Oxygen, and protons hate to get close to each other (I think Bohr called it the “proton cootie” effect). The universe had to cool down enough for all the light elements to condense into stars, dense enough that the protons were crushed together in nuclear fusion, causing the stars to light up as they formed heavier elements such as Oxygen. Altogether, that whole process took another couple million years.

From there, the recipe for making water is fairly simple: combine two Hydrogen atoms with an atom of Oxygen and light a match. After your singed eyebrows grow back you will have a molecule of water, H20.

At room temperature on earth, water is liquid, but once it gets cold enough, it becomes solid and forms ice. Depending on how cold it is, how humid, and what the air pressure is, the ice will take on different shapes. There are sixteen known kinds of ice, but most are very rare around here, and only appear in odd places such as Mars or one of Saturn’s moons. The most common ice on earth is called hexagonal Ice One, so called because the water molecules all line up in a nice six-sided honeycomb shaped array. I had always assumed that this was old knowledge, but was surprised to learn that the structure of common ice was not understood until Linus Pauling (famous for promoting Vitamin C, and almost beating Watson & Crick to the discovery of the DNA double helix) figured out its shape back in 1935. He had to use the brand new theory of quantum mechanics to do it, so I guess ice is a lot more tricky stuff than I thought.

(Incidentally, fans of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s book Cats Cradle will be interested to learn that there really is an Ice Nine. When he wrote the book there were only seven known. Fortunately for us, the real Ice IX does not have a freezing point above room temperature. So it goes.)

Anyway, it’s from those six-sided hexagons in the ice crystals that snowflakes get their pretty, unique shape, such as the ones that I was able to capture in the photos here at left. The general way that snowflakes form is understood, but there are some things about the perfect symmetry of many snowflakes that scientists still cannot completely explain. The main character in my novel won a prize (in the story) for his solution to the question of why snowflakes are so symmetrical… but you’ll have to read the book to find out what that is.

Even if the ice crystals are not free-floating but stuck on something, the same processes that make snowflakes form the fern-like branches of frost on our bedroom window.

The ice crystals in snow act like little prisms that reflect and scatter all the the light that goes through them, so that if enough of the stuff piles up on the ground, the only color you see is — white. On a clear day the shadows of the snow appear blue, because they are reflecting the only light that hits them directly, which is the blue of the sky.

As you may recall, the first big snowstorm of the season hit us on the day before my birthday, December 20th. Over nine inches of snow fell altogether, and by the time we came out that morning the backyard and surrounding countryside was completely covered in what looked like smooth marshmallow creme…

…except for the tracks. It was really interesting to play detective and try to sort out what animals had been wandering or hopping around our backyard the night before, where they came from and where they went. In this picture, to the far right the tracks of our “ten o’clock rabbit” can be seen. The rabbit is traveling towards the camera. The tracks of a rabbit hopping along at a modest clip is, I’ve learned, usually shaped in the form of the letter ‘Y’. The bottom of the Y is formed by the rabbit’s two front paws coming down for a landing, one in front of the other. The rabbit’s bigger hind legs then land slightly in front of the two prints, side-by-side.

In the middle a squirrel was hopping away from the camera, crossing over the rabbit’s tracks. Squirrel tracks look like the letter ‘W’, because the squirrel puts his small front paws side-by-side, then his hind quarters land just past. To the far left a dog or a coyote was following along, possibly after the rabbit. We’ve seen more rabbit tracks since this photo was taken, so I’m pretty sure the ten o’clock rabbit is still on schedule and hasn’t been eaten.

Eventually, as the temperature began to drop, the creek has started to freeze, forming plates out from the rocks and boulders in the water. A few snowflakes fell on the plates of ice, and they grew into these large white starfish crystals. They must have been a couple of inches wide. Some other plates of ice had formed in the front yard, capturing in the process some of the little spruce pine cones and needles. Gigi spotted this one sample.

Some of the forms that water takes are no mystery. The icicles coming down from the roof, for example, just form when the snow on the roof, warmed by the inside air, melt and trickle down to the edge, freezing again in the cold night air.

Some of these other features, however, took some guess work. I came down one morning to see what appeared to be roman numerals embedded in the snow. The mystery was resolved when I noticed that some of the icicles hanging from the roof had fallen into the snow at odd angles, carving out the figures you see here.

Some fierce wind kicked up a few days later, and at first I thought our windows were being pelted with hail, but after going outside later after the storm the snow was littered with ice in the shape of half pipes. That’s what happens when you live in Los Angeles all your life. People who grow up in cold climates probably know all about this stuff and have names for it, but I had no clue where the things came from. It took another large gust of wind for me to see that these were the shells of ice that formed on the branches of trees and leaves, sliding off only after the wind had bent and shaken the branches enough to liberate the half-pipes and leaf-shaped ice.

Here is another one of those little attention grabbers for you: an incredible amount of water has passed through your body, and then gone back into the atmosphere by sweat and — other means. That water gets churned around so much in the clouds that most of the water that has ever passed through you is completely mixed up by now with all the other water on the planet. So much so that, in each of those six little snowflakes I photographed above, when you do the math, on average each one of them has about a thousand molecules of water that were once inside of you.

Think about that some time. It’s deep.

If you turn the mathematics around the other way, it also means this: think about any famous person in history, Alexander the Great, Jesus, Buddha, Genghis Khan, Queen Nefertiti. According to the laws of probability, it is virtually certain that you now have within your own body, molecules of water that once coursed through the veins of each of these men and women. For millions of years, billions of humans have come and gone, leaving behind their water. And you have within you a few molecules from each of them, as well as uncounted numbers of lions, pterodactyls, and velociraptors, all life going all the way back to the beginning of the world, made from water and other elements formed by a long dead star that exploded in a supernova perhaps eight billion years ago.

I started this little essay with a discussion of the big bang, and I leave you now with another picture of the same universe pictured before, in the coffee mug from which it came.

Ah, coffee. Remind me to talk about the shape of the caffeine molecule some day…

The snow began to fall early afternoon on the 19th, and did not let up until after midnight. Large fluffy flakes piled up at the rate of over an inch an hour, and the air was still and quiet.

By the morning the backyard had lost all remaining signs of Fall. Only a few stray oak leaves that fell overnight punctuated the smooth white carpet that surrounded us.

Someone had told us that the reason the leaves fall is that they are pushed out by new growth underneath. I had always pictured Winter as a time of dormancy, when everything is asleep or dead. Everywhere you look, however, there are already signs of new life in the bud.

All together more than a foot of snow fell over the next 24 hours. It’s funny how all the old holiday songs about snow and winter and mistletoe suddenly begin to make sense when you look out a window and the gentle cascade of snow envelops the world in a hushed peaceful whisper.

We took the opportunity on my birthday to test out our new snowshoes. The old fashioned ones used to look like tennis rackets; these are very different, and are sort of metal frames with cross-beams into which you snap your boots. We snowshoed out into the Rose’s Berry farm out back of the property, and went over to check out how our Christmas tree was doing. We had it tagged back in October, and planned to cut it down just in time for the holidays. The view from the farmland looks like a classic Christmas card. Wish you could be here!

Snow Tubing
At some point we did begin to realize however that, just as the price of fall colors was the Rake, the price of all this winter wonderland was … snow blowers and snow shovels and wrestling bundles of wood in for the long winter’s night. The one upside of the hard physical labor was that we discovered an inflatable inner-tube sled in the garage (while searching for the extension cord for the snow-blower starter motor).

This has all been a lot of fun, but now its three days since the snow began to fall, and every muscle in my body is sore. No wonder folks around here are so thin. The seasons are pretty, but they’re a hell of a lot of work. Enjoy the videos!

Niles on the tube:
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Gigi leaps into action:
[youtube]2Mv75dtoneY[/youtube]

Like a turtle on its back:
[youtube]QVZ6sYoGdRs[/youtube]

The house we are renting on Blueberry Lane is located at 41°39’29.20″N latitude, 72°34’45.10″W longitude. If you are curious, you can see our house on Google Maps. When I was working at NASA-Jet Propulsion Labs, I hung out with a lot of mapping people, geographers and cartographers mostly, to whom Geography mattered. In this little note I’d like to explore that notion a bit.

Latitude

When I was a kid I was never able to sort out which was which until one clever friend (let’s give him credit: Jim Conolly) suggested the mnemonic “latitude is flatitude”. So, the latitude lines run horizontally, east-west, and represent how close you are to the equator (at 0 degrees), or the poles (at 90 degrees) respectively. For sailors, this was alway the easy one to figure out when you were lost at sea, because the further north you were, the lower the noontime Sun sat over the horizon. At nighttime, you could “shoot the stars” with a sextant and measure how high Orion or Polaris or some other star rose in the sky. Our current latitude is 41°39’29.20″N, the N meaning North of the equator.

That’s pretty darn far north. It puts us almost halfway between the Tropic of Cancer (below which the noontime Sun will appear straight overhead) and the Arctic circle (above which the noontime sun may not even come above the horizon). I wasn’t quite sure how North that really was though, until I got out a map and checked to see where I would be at that latitude if I were over in California. It turns out that would be around Yreka, which is about seventy miles north of Redding (where my older brother Keith and his wife Cindy reside), and just 30 minutes away from the Oregon border.

What does all this mean in daily life? Mostly, its about daylight and how much of it you get. If you were down at the equator, for example, no matter what season, the sun is up for about 12 hours a day and usually goes somewhere straight overhead. At the poles, on the other hand, during the winter the sun doesn’t come up at all, while during the summer it may stay up 24/7, and simply circle around you, just above the horizon like an hour hand. In our case, deep in November, it means when I get up at 5:45am to make coffee, I am feeling my way through pitch black. The sun finally comes up around 7, but by 3pm it is already twilight. When we lived out in Los Angeles, Gigi and I would go for a walk every day, along the beach, in bright sunlight. Up here, we still go for walks through the trails in the backwoods and farmland, but broad sunlight? Not so much. I’m thinking of taking vitamin D supplements just to make up for what my skin would otherwise produce.

Longitude

Longitude is all about clock-time. While even the ancient Greeks knew how to determine latitude, the problem of reliably finding your longitude was not solved until recently, when really accurate clocks could be made. The real problem was, unlike latitude, one longitude line (meridian) was just like any other. There was nothing you could look at in the sky to tell you your longitude. So, they had to just arbitrarily pick one (which happened to pass through an observatory in Greenwich, England), and then measure all the other ones with respect to that one, which is called the Prime Meridan.

Not everybody agreed on where “Zero” longitude should be. The French, for example, did not think that Greenwich England was a suitable location, and so they (of course) chose a place near Paris for their “Zero.” This had some serious consequences back when they began building the “Chunnel” tunnel underneath the English Channel, linking England up to France. Each side began digging their end of the tunnel from their coastline towards the other, and had agreed beforehand where (in latitude/longitude) they would meet in the middle of the channel. A few years past, and as the two digging projects began to approach they realized that they were off by about 5 feet in the east-west direction. Apparently the French used the Paris-based longitude system, which they only now discovered did not agree with the British one. Fortunately, they were able to “jog” their tunnels a bit at the end so they joined up.

Our longitude is 72°34’45.10″W, the W meaning West of Greenwich. Our old house in Long Beach was at 118°W, three time zones away. This means that when I come downstairs and sit t my computer at 8am, it is still 5am in California. And that in turn means I have about two hours when I can work on my writing, noodle around on Yahoo or Google, and have breakfast before anyone even thinks about showing up at the L.A. Office. Typically, I start work at 10am EST (Eastern Time), and work until 6pm EST, which is around 3pm on the west coast. Of course, due to the effect of latitude, the sun has already been down for over an hour, and so I end my work day with pitch blackness outside my window. To get some walking done, Gigi and I usually try to get out around 3pm, which works out well for the L.A folks, because it is lunchtime there.

Latitude and Longitude. Just numbers. Numbers that pin your life down on the fragile surface of a blue marble spinning in an elliptical orbit at 18 miles a second around a small yellow star in the minor arm of a barred spiral galaxy that completes just one rotation every 250,000 years around a black hole with a mass of a hundred thousand suns, the whole nebulous pinwheel hurtling towards an unavoidable collision in two billion years with the Andromeda galaxy. Numbers that tell you when to get up in the morning, when you should go out for a walk with your wife through the backwoods, and how much snow will be on the ground when you look through the frosted windows of a New England house as you sip on spiced apple cider on Christmas morning.

Here is a Riddle:

Question: What is the one thing that even the gods fear?
Answer: To be forgotten.

Journal Entry, Saturday November 8, 2008
Cloudy, 59 degrees, more rain expected later

12:45pm: Gigi and I were getting ready to go for a walk when I went out to the garage and noticed a mouse, clinging to the automatic garage door that rolls up into the top of the garage. At first I thought it was just climbing, but when I got closer saw that it was actually caught, its left arm crushed between the folding panels of the garage door. It must have gotten caught the night before, when we came back from dinner.

I was able to free the mouse from the door, but its arm was completely useless. It squeaked a couple of times when I lowered it to the ground and it tried to hobble off slowly towards some leaves, but I didn’t think that it would live long and it was obviously suffering. A rain-storm was coming this afternoon and I couldn’t bear the thought of it going through its last hours in the downpour.

I don’t know what to do.

Gigi and I talked about it. I couldn’t stand seeing it suffer, and thought about putting it out of its misery quickly, with a hoe or a shovel, but Gigi thought that would be cruel and suggested drowning it — which from what I’ve heard is an unpleasant way to die and seemed even more cruel. As I speak, we have put the mouse on a rag-blanket, in a small cardboard box, with some bits of cheese nearby for him to nibble on. But I am still at a loss. Are we doing the mouse any favors by giving it food, which could only serve to prolong its life and therefore its suffering? Which is the greater kindness?

No doubt if I were a farmer or a hunter I would have no qualms about dispatching the mouse and wouldn’t think twice about it again. Until today, the mouse and I had separate destinies, but now I have no choice but to think about what future the mouse will have. Either we

1. somehow take it to a vet and then nurse it back to health, minus one arm, and keep it warm and safe and fed in a cage with water and cheese and peanut butter.
2. take it out to the forest and set it free to find its own destiny — which we will then never know and always wonder about
3. keep it comfortable for whatever time it has left, or
4. kill it, mercifully

What would the mouse want?

3:00pm, same day: The mouse was still alive as of two hours ago. At that time I put the box with the mouse in it in the garage. I started the engine of our car, left the engine running, then closed the garage door. Carbon Monoxide is supposed to make you fall asleep, and then never wake up. A half hour later I came back out and turned off the engine, but left the door closed with all the exhaust in it. Will check on the mouse later.

4:06pm, same day: The mouse is still alive. When I opened the door and looked in the box, he stirred. Oh God, little mouse, why do you cling to your life so fiercely? Feeling remorse. He was already victimized once by the modern machinery of civilization, and now here I’ve gone and subjected him to toxic fumes, and yet he still lives. I was trying to be merciful, but was too stupid to have read about how modern automobiles, with their catalytic converters, produce almost no Carbon Monoxide anymore. So all I succeeded in doing was the make the air around him a bit more unpleasant. I let the air clear out, closed the garage door, and went back inside.

Tried without success to not think about him, the rest of the evening.

Sunday, November 9, 2008
Sunny, cool 52 degrees. Sunny all day.

Eating oatmeal for breakfast. Have not gone out yet to check on the little mouse. We have done our best to keep him comfortable. The rain fell hard last night and I consoled myself that at least he was in a warm dry place. I don’t want him to suffer. How is it possible that such a tiny little thing could bring my entire world to a standstill?

10:06am, same day: I went out to the garage after breakfast. The mouse must have passed away some time during the night. His eyes were closed and he appeared to be at peace. I said a few buddhist prayers for the repose of his life, wishing him all the best for the next, and thanking him for this lesson in life.

Strange all the things you think about. To get through life, it seems, you must be able to hold seemingly contradictory facts about the world in your heart as true, in spite of the contradiction. They always seem to come in pairs, one of which is

1. Nobody should ever die alone, and
2. In this world, we all die alone.

11:00am, same day: I took the mouse, still on his rag blanket in the box, down to the river in the forest next to the farm. I found a sunny spot near where the water cascades over the rocks. A peaceful place. I buried him near an oak tree by the cascade and put a rock marker on the grave. And so, life goes on. And Fall turns to Winter, which never fails to turn into Spring.

But this little mouse: he will be remembered.

We went down to New Haven a few weekends ago to explore a bit of Yale University, and to check out the train schedules into New York. As an incidental bonus, we also caught sight of the Amtrak “56 Vermonter” train, which is the very train on which the opening scenes of my novel “The Pythagorean Concerto” takes place.

While we were on campus, we visited the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural Sciences. The museum was founded in 1866 by George Peabody, the philantropist uncle of O.C. Marsh, the great paleontologist. Marsh used the museum to house the fossil dinosaur bones he discovered on his excavations in the Western United States in the 1870’s, and from which he mounted his scientific and personal battle with his long-time rival, fellow paleontology Edward Drinker Cope. Their already poor relationship went on a sharp downturn after Cope published a description of Elasmosaurus (a giant aquatic dinosaur) — and Marsh pointed out that Cope had placed the skull on the wrong end of the skeleton. Oops.

It was on one of his later “Yale College Scientific Expeditions” that Marsh befriended the great chief Red Cloud, head of the Oglala Lakota Sioux. Red Cloud had earlier been at war with the U.S Army and had signed a treaty with the U.S in 1868, but his tribe had the misfortune of residing in gold-rich land, resulting in their forced relocation to the Badlands. Red Cloud only allowed Marsh onto their reservation, in exchange for his promise to communicate the rampant corruption and food problems back to U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant. The chief was pleasantly surprised when Marsh kept his word to Red Cloud, and they remained friends thereafter.

These facts tie in tangentially to my novel. One of the characters, Lilith Cohen-Ptesanwi, is a Jewish-Lakota paleontologist at Hammersmith university, who spent much of her youth out on the Lakota reservations and at many of the digs, and who continues to go out to the Dakotas, Wyoming and Utah each year. This plays a role in a later part of the story.

We were greeted out front of the museum by a lifesize statue of a Torosaurus, which looks very much like a Triceratops. Inside on the ground floor was a good sampling of the original Marsh collection, including his famous almost-complete Apatosaurus (aka “brontosaurus”). There were also some temporary exhibits, including one called “The Tree of Life”, which was an heroic attempt to explain the current evolutionary theory of life in a way that would appeal to the common sense of evolution-doubters. I’m not sure how well they succeeded in this effort. Some concepts are intrinsically difficult, and require an investment of mental energy that, quite frankly, many people do not (or cannot) bring to the discussion. For those people to whom complex, nuanced chains of thought are simply too much trouble, “God did it” makes a much more satisfying story, and there’s not much you can say in answer to that. You might as well be speaking Swahili.

In the “Tree of Life” exhibit, there was a display of live Elephant Shrews, muddling about with their long noses. Contrary to the impression given by this little video, an elephant shrew cannot be identified by its signature call “Momeee! Wook at dat!”
[youtube]4CQKlkEYRfk[/youtube]

After wandering around the first floor for a bit we decided to take a free guided tour by one of the volunteer docents at the museum, a very interesting fellow named Gene Scalise. Gene is a semi-retired finance attorney, who amuses himself by taking on jobs such as grocery clerk, just to find out what that life must be like. We spent almost as much time after the tour just talking the fellow, as we did on the tour itself. He has met a lot of interesting people in his adventures, and is hoping to write a book about it.

“Travel is fatal to prejudice” –Mark Twain, Innocents Abroad

Two week ago on Labor Day we took advantage of the sunny weather and went on our first literary pilgrimage, this time up to Hartford to see the Mark Twain House. This was the house where Samuel L. Clemens and his family lived during eighteen of the most productive years in his career, and where under the pen name of “Mark Twain” he wrote Huck Finn, Connecticut Yankee, and almost all of his other famous works.

The House
The house, which both Twain and his family loved and to which Twain felt a spiritual kinship, has been described as Gothic Revival, but also has some stick work features on its otherwise brick exterior that some say was influenced by the “Victorian Stick Style”, but which make me think more of the criss-cross “Fachwerk” wood patterns on traditional German / Bavarian houses. In any case, the recently restored house was beautiful, and had many touches (including glass and interior work by Tiffany himself) that anticipated the “Arts and Crafts” movement that produced many of the most appealing houses that I have ever entered.

The house was a gift from Twain’s father in law, who was a wealthy and successful businessman. The same could not be said for Twain himself: few of his business ventures ever paid off. After a particularly poor investment rendered them unable to afford the upkeep on their beloved house they were forced to move to Europe, where they lived for a number of years, and where Mark Twain embarked on a worldwide tour, in hopes of earning enough money to return to the states and the house.

“My axiom is: to succeed in business, avoid my example”
— Mark Twain

Writing Room
Twain wrote late at night in the top floor of the house, which was a low-ceiling room in which there was a pool table and his desk, and where, our tour guide claimed, he would entertain male visitors with cigars and liquor. To highlight this, both the ceiling and the south-facing windows were decorated with pool cues and cigars. The windows were notable for being very thin translucent sheets of rock, etched by the architect with a coat-of-arms of billiard ball-and-cue, as well as the date of construction. Other than the occasional guests, the writing room was off limits to all but the cleaning staff. (Alas, I was not able to get a photo of the translucent windows, as all interior photography was forbidden — but you can see a grainy video capture of the room here).

Technology
Mark Twain was always fascinated by science and technology (the picture here taken in 1894 in Nicola Tesla’s laboratory), and the house, though constructed in the 1880’s, already had some very advanced gadgets, such as an acoustic intercom (based I believe on the same principle as the tin-can-and-string phone), as well as a bleeding-edge device known as a telephone. The telephone had of course no end of technical problems, and our tour guide produced some interesting sheets of notation that Twain had used each month to complain to the Bell telephone company. One squiggle mark, for example, apparently indicated “the sound of artillery was heard on the line”, while another mark meant that “no combination of switches on the phone would connect us to anybody.”

The Book Store
The museum book store was filled with books by and about Mark Twain. It is perhaps a testimonial to the interest and popularity of Twain that not only were there dozens of books in the store about Mark Twain, there was even one novel-length book whose title and subject was “How to Write About Mark Twain.” I wondered at the time how that author knew how to go about writing that book, and whether he expected to write yet another book on that topic (and so on…).

How To Tell a Story
I was sufficiently intimidated by the sheer volume of writings by and about Twain that I may well be permanently incapable of bringing myself to the level of arrogance of ego to think I could add anything new to the discussion. If you read more and beyond just the Disney versions of Huck, you begin to see the dark shadows on the edge of the primary colors, and the satirical rage at the follies of the foolish animal called man.

“The humorous story is told gravely; the teller does his best to conceal the fact that he even dimly suspects that there is anything funny about it; but the teller of the comic story tells you beforehand that it is one of the funniest things he has ever heard, then tells it with eager delight, and is the first person to laugh when he gets through. It is a pathetic thing to see[…] To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art, if my position is correct.” –Mark Twain, “How to Tell a Story”

Uppercase and Lowercase
In the museum adjacent to the house was displayed the Pierce automatic typesetting machine which was Twain’s financial downfall. Besides being a riverboat captain on the Mississippi, a prospector in the motherlode country, and an editor, Twain had also been a type-setter. The Pierce machine failed because they were never able to get all the bugs out of it. For comparison there was also on display an old-fashioned typesetting machine, with its trays of letters used to put together a page of a newspaper. As an interesting bit of trivia, the big letters were kept in the upper tray (case), while all the little letters were in the lower case. And hence, so the theory goes, the origin of “uppercase” and “lowercase” letters.

Cats
One surprising feature, ubiquitous in the bookstore, were paintings and pictures of cats. Mark Twain loved cats, which distinguishes him from another of Connecticut’s resident authors, James Thurber. Thurber was a dog man to the core, and had been known to refer to someone in print as “a notorious cat man”. Thurber did not live in Connecticut until long after Twain had died, however, and even then lived nowhere near Hartford, but up in West Cornwall.

But that is another story, and a literary pilgrimage for another day…

“Always obey your parents when they are present.”
— Mark Twain, “Advice to Youth”

If there were any place on the planet that would make a “Morning Person” out of me, it would be here. (Note the telltale subjunctives in that last sentence for future reference). There are chirping birds of all stripes and colors, there are brooks babbling, and the backyard is a verdant forest painted in shades of green that even a color blind person such as myself can see. — Which is a good thing, because this is the only time during the working day when I can get any writing done. Later on the Day Job takes over, and given my obsessive compulsive nature, that activity won’t stop until I am exhausted. And so, for two hours in the morning I sit here at my desk, write in my journal, stare out at the starlings or piping plovers (or whatever those little birds are out there at the moment) get inspired, try to write my 1500 words a day, and then move on to earn the rent money for this house. Morning is therefore the perfect and only time in which I can get anything creative done.

In spite of all this, I am not a morning person. There, I’ve said it.

Not that I have anything against Morning People. In fact, I admire them, aspire to be one of them, and hell, I even married one of them. It did not take me long to realize that Gigi, like many Morning People, has a spring-loaded waking system, in which one minute they are sound asleep, and the next moment they have sprung out of bed as if it was a toaster, now humming and flitting about the house like a song bird, and then on occasion passing by the bed to poke at my inanimate form to see if I am still breathing. I too have a spring-loaded sleep mechanism, but it appears that it only manifests itself on the entry portal to sleep, and not the exit. I can fall asleep moments after my head has hit the pillow, and this after drinking coffee or espresso, even late at night.

But I am slow to wake, and I have found that any attempt to accelerate the process to be painful at best. If for Morning People, waking up is like popping out of a toaster, then for me, the best metaphor I have found is that of swimming through an ocean of cold molasses, far out to sea, the distant shore of the Bright Eyed And Bushy Tailed just past any reachable horizon. Even when with great effort I reach dry land, some vestigial molasses still remains in my ears and brain, gumming up the entire works.

Morning People do not appear to have much sympathy for, or even understanding of the nature of the Slow Riser, to the point of considering their behavior a sign of character flaw. This is much in the same way that extraverts try to claim the high ground over the shy intraverts, and the way in which Men and Women fail to see the other’s perspective at all. This morning, when in a state of particular befuddlement — the Cobwebs in the Brain level — I ran a search on How To Become A Morning Person, and found many articles on the subject. Almost every single one of them written by a notorious morning person type, making the presumptuous assumption that of course everybody wants to be one of them, an affliction not limited solely to Americans and The Beautiful People tribes. The articles all had similar suggestions, such as “stop staying up so late”, and “try to get up the same time each day”, and “find something you like to do in the morning to motivate you to get up.” I have problems with almost all of these suggestions, which would have been obvious to anyone who was not already one of The Chosen.

Let’s take the last suggestion as an illustrative example. Only a morning person finds it self-evident that there could be something, anything, pleasant to do in the morning. Very high on my list of things I Like To Do is to eat Hot Fudge Cake with ice cream on the side. However, if it is early in the morning (which by my definition is any time before noon), my taste buds do not work, my brain feels like it is filled with cotton candy, and I find myself looking out through bleary eyes at the muddled blur of an outside world of which I am only half aware. In that physical and mental state, eating Hot Fudge Cake with ice cream on the side is a complete waste of time and energy, and even a little bit depressing, because I know full well that this is perfectly good Hot Fudge Cake and that it would taste great at about, say, ten pm in the evening with a nice cup of espresso, so why the hell am I eating now when it serves no purpose at all? For a non Morning Person such as me, there is only one pleasant thing to be doing at this hour of the morning, and that is to be back in bed, eyes closed, allowing the dreams of the night gradually fade, and hover in that pleasant semi-conscious state for a few more hours, cocooned in blankets, until the dawning awareness of the outside world begins to creep into view, and (two cups of coffee later), a feeling of being almost awake has appeared, which only becomes fully formed by around lunch time.

I think what most Morning People have not grasped is the possibility that the reason there is a genetic basis for the Slow Riser is that the species has found an evolutionary advantage to keeping on hand a certain percentage of the species with this predilection for slow rising. The morning people must have been the ones to go out and catch the fish, kill the sabre tooth tigers and march on Troy. Those are the CEO’s and the Presidents, the ones that often Do Great Things, and often cause the most trouble. The slow risers tend to be a reflective lot, and indeed many if not most scientist and philosphers get their best ideas in the hypnogogic state, the dreamlike state when ideas can most easily float free. These are your Socrates and Einsteins, the Thinkers who sometimes keep the Do-ers from getting in too much trouble. I believe that they have their uses. It is just that (like the intraverts) they usually don’t win the popularity contests.

I also have an almost scientific hypothesis about the Slow Riser / Morning Person dichotomy, and its genetic basis. In my statistically dubious sampling, I have found that the people I know who are Slow Risers, are also people who thrive in warm weather, and even stay bundled up until the thermometer goes above eighty degrees Fahrenheit. The other crowd, who can sometimes be seen wearing shorts during the winter, seem to process and retain body temperature in a different way from the others. These people I have often found are early risers. So the whole thing may boil down to energy, and how we retain or radiate away heat. If this hypothesis is true, it is easily testable with a set of experiments and interviews.

Hell, if I got up early enough I could write a research proposal for an NSF grant and do the study myself. But for the moment, it’s just started to rain and all I really want to do is to just crawl back in bed and listen to the staccato tapping of raindrops on the window.

On the day that we arrived on Blueberry Lane, I started a journal. A real, hardbound leather clad journal, in which I make entries for each day, including weather for the day, a few notes on the events of the previous day, wildlife, etc. My working plan is to try to write for two hours each morning. On some days I have better success with this plan than other days, when the mood or weather or my day job introduce other distractions. In any case, three items in the morning ritual that are inviolate are:

• Drink coffee
• Refill fountain pen
• Write in journal

For the most part, these blog entries are excerpts from the Journal, augmented with sound and pictures. In case you are wondering, almost every entry the last two weeks has begun the same way, which is to say: “August NN, 2008. Sunny in the morning, turning to thunderstorms later”.

The entry today begins in precisely that same way.

Found a nest in the backyard the other day, after one of the larger rainstorms had come and gone. The rain must have loosened the mud holding the thing together and finally gravity won out. Gravity is strong at this time of year: abandoned nests falling from branches, whole branches crashing down from trees, and the branches that remain lose their leaves.

I was looking out the window to our backyard last Wednesday, watching some leaves fall during a brief moment of sunshine. Each leaf fell with no fluttering or side-to-side motion, but straight down and slow, like in a dream. They reminded me of the snowflakes that fell in the first snowfall I ever saw in Boston, the winter of 1980. It was early evening, and I could see the snow starting to fall from my apartment window, so ran outside to investigate. The streetlights were on, and illuminated the large, fluffy flakes as they glided down on a windless night. There is something about an early winter snowfall that makes everything suddenly quiet, and peaceful. Many of the people who passed me by that evening had doubtless seen too many winters of snow and took no notice, but to me the moment was magical, otherworldly, and of ineffable beauty.

For the snowflake and the leaf, the fall is inevitable. But even then, a fall can at times be graceful.