I spent mine hiking around a mountain covered in boulders and caves.

Granite Mountain Photos

Wandered down to Southern AZ for a long weekend… some photos here.

On my last night there, I used a cigarette as an excuse to go outside. I sat there naked on a brick patio in the middle of the desert, the cool night air flowing through me. Past the silhouettes of saguaros and ocotillo, the lights of Tucson twinkled below, just far enough away for comfort. The desert is where I belong, and sooner or later, I’ll find myself there again.

I finally got around to adding my photos from Colorado. It’s only taken five months.

Well, being cooped up inside for months, I don’t have a whole lot to say. However, I’m adding a couple of new photo galleries. My hike on Shaw Butte in Phoenix is one of them; you’ll just have to take a peek and see what else I throw up there.

Okay. I’ll talk.

Eight days.

For eight days I lived in a tiny wilderness tent village, population of twenty. A 10×15 canvas wall tent served us as kitchen, closet, shelter… as everything we could need outside our small, stretched-nylon bedrooms.

For eight days, I escaped the world of bills and bullshit and apartments full of appliances and collected possessions. I brought what I could carry and I rose before 5:00 AM daily so that I could be ready to work at six. We worked ten-hour days in the heat and the mosquitos, the biting flies with sawblades for mouthpieces, who would tear holes in your skin and make you blow up like a balloon for days.

For eight days, I recorded data on forest understory. To put it simply, for eight days, I wrote. I sat in whatever shade could be salvaged and I recorded species codes and cover percentage as it was shouted out to me. There were some plots with over sixty species, each bearing a six-letter epithet abbreviation that was proclaimed as a word. LIGPOR. CARSIC. PSEMON. BROCIL. OSMDEP. Each became a unit, a newly-invented word, to be added nebulously to my vocabulary. Not always finding a plant to cling to, most of them float through my mind still, troubling and distracting like poorly-remembered song lyrics.

For eight days: find plot center. Locate a piece of rebar driven into the ground at a given azimuth, 25 m in either direction. Run tape from Point A to Point C. Place 2 x 0.5 m frame at precise location on tape. Count species. Identify species. Move frame. Pack up, remove tape, hike up steep slopes so densely vegetated it tore at your pants, grabbed at your ankles and arms like some desperate green monsters hungry for your blood. You fell countless times in a day, slamming knees and scraping skin on rock, filling your skin with cuts and thorns to be picked and cared for when there was time.

Ten hours, not counting lunch. For eight days we worked for ten hours in the blistering sun, menacing thunderstorms and impenetrable thickets. After work, it was time to begin dinner. I cooked every night. Village cook for a town of twenty. When you’re out there, your perception of food changes. If it’s there, you eat it. If it’s good, you horde it, saving your unrefrigerated leftovers from dinner for tomorrow’s lunch to avoid that questionable lunch meat at the bottom of the melted-ice kiddy pool of a cooler.

Water is brought in with 5-gallon jugs, as many as we can fit. Water, at times, runs low, requiring runs to town where as many as possible hop into the jeep and drive down forty-five minutes of dirt roads for the chance to sit underneath a drainpipe of hot, sulfurous spring water and jump into the icy, shallow river. The chance to wash your face is treasured. The sight of people and cars, after only a few days, becomes a bit overwhelming.

By day six or so, nobody knows quite what to think. Is it almost over? Is it impossibly long? Should I celebrate? Should I cry? After dinner, someone quietly begins to build the campfire, camp chairs circling around and guitars being lugged out from who-knows-where. Someone plays softly while a girl with a beautiful voice sings gently beside. Eyes glue to the center, wistful, restless, content, reflected fire serving as an unintended window into the soul. Eyes close slowly and guardedly as the smoke switches directions. The sound of our family giggling at a distant tent reminds us of our closeness.

We’re located on the edge of a canyon, a veritable rim with a tumultuous fall beneath, dropping hundred of feet to a meadowy creek bottom. Pines line the cliffsides densely, and clouds and mountains provide ample backdrop. Finding another restless soul, we wander the rim in either direction, finding precarious perches on which to sit and watch. He knocks off a rock the size of the basketball; we hear it tumble for about a minute.

The smoke and the sweat, the odor of bacon and insect repellent; it becomes an unnoticed theme amongst us and conjure in me memories that wash over with a distinct warmness. We smile gently at each other in passing, share what we have without a second consideration. For eight days, we silently agree, we become something different. Something special. Something outside and natural in some deeply-fulfilling sense. For eight days, we live that way, freed in some fundamental and ancestral way.

Shocking. It’s the only way to describe returning to the city. Harshness. Right angles. Clean floors. It’s strange. You isolate yourself for days after, trying to readjust. The night after our return, we reconvened for a small potluck. It wasn’t the same, but the campfire and the community sense helped ease the shock and the civilization.

Around the fire, one turns to me. He is a Marine and we clash. “Hey,” he says to me, “I wanted to tell you…” Hesitation. “You really rocked on this trip. First trip– well, you know– everyone has a rough first trip. But you really rocked this one. And I wanted to say thank you.”

I smile and drop my eyes to the fire. I don’t know what to say, so I ask him if he’d like a beer so I can excuse myself long enough to wipe the welling tears.

Eight days of discomfort and interdependence. Eight days make me wonder: how many more?

So, upgrading wordpress tragically made my custom theme disappear. My fault for not having a backup, really.

How sad. I will fix it eventually, but it is gonna take a while.

Having decided to take a year-long hiatus from the forestry program in order to take care of my biology minor (and, I’ll be honest, to take it easy for a while), I’ve been perusing the university’s catalog for bio classes that both sound enthralling and fit into my schedule. Today, I happened upon a web-based course entitled “Science, Religion & Reality”. The name itself makes me grin; I can’t wait for the discussion forum. I suspect that those opting to take this course will share some of my views on science, religion, and reality– though I can imagine some with opposing viewpoints enrolling to protest.

The description sounds awesome:

BIO301: Important topics in today’s world showing significant differences of opinion or beliefs contrasting with scientific evidence or contemporary practice, such as life’s origin, beginning of an individual, sexual orientation, death.

I imagine some people take serious issue with this class. I know I am on the edge of my seat already.

I’ll also be taking entomology, a database design course (as a prerequisite to spring’s web development class), and “Ecological Restoration Applications”, as well as a few weekend environmental ed courses. The computer classes essentially there to help me out with my budding web design business (will provide link to my spellbound audience of prolifically-commenting spambots as soon as I get my own site up and running, which won’t be until after I finish my first client’s site). I’m quite excited about the whole process and can’t wait to further my programming skills.

I’ve also begun painting again; someday, I’ll get around to posting some of my work.

Tomorrow I’ll be visiting West Clear Creek with a few dozen middle-school kids, shadowing the instructors to help with my environmental education aspirations. My species tick list should be fantastic!

I’m on a new plan: whenever prudent, I will be hiking Mars Hill at 5am to see the sunrise over Flagstaff. I did so this morning, and I’m feeling fantastic. I’m also rather proud of my plant ID list:

• Pinus ponderosa – ponderosa pine
• Quercus gambelii – Gambel oak
• Pinus edulis – pinyon pine
• Linaria dalmatica – Dalmation toadflax (invasive little bastard)
• Artemisia carruthii – wormwood sage
• Ceanothus fendleri – Fendler’s ceanothus
• Festuca arizonica – Arizona fescue
• Lotus wrightii – deervetch
• Ipomopsis aggregata – skyrocket
• Penstemon barbatus – gold-beard penstemon
• Cirsium parryi – Parry’s thistle
• Cirsium vulgare – bull thistle
• Gutierrezia sarothrae – broom snakeweed
• Verbascum thapsis – common mullein
• Bouteloua curtipendula – side-oats grama
• Bromus anomalus – nodding brome
• Bromus tectorum – cheatgrass
• Hordeum vulgare – common barley
• Muhlenbergia montana – mountain muhly
• Muhlenbergia wrightii – spike muhly
• Melilotus albus – white sweetclover
• Lupinus argenteus – silver lupine
• Abies concolor – white fir
• Bouteloua gracilis – blue grama
• Thalictrum fendleri – Fendler’s meadowrue
• Poa pratensis – Kentucky bluegrass
• Poa secunda – Sandberg bluegrass
• Juniperus communis – common juniper
• Geranium caespitosum – wild geranium

Woohoo! Didn’t have my field guide with me, either. Unfortunately, as I sat down in the grasses to watch the show, I realized I’d lost my camera. I furrowed my brow and pondered it for a moment. Aha! I’d crawled under a barbed-wire fence. And, indeed, after leaving, I found my crossing point, my camera, and the gate through the barbed wire a mere 30 feet away.

Beautiful morning, beautiful sunrise… I’ve started painting again, and intend to try to paint something from the sketches I drew up there.

Also:

wild geranium

Since I’ve begun to transition my cat to a raw food diet, I’ve been doing a lot of scheming and research on how I can go about this in the best way possible. One of my search queries, prompted by the success I had with thawed (and, uh, the first time- cut) baby feeder mice, was “cat live diet”. One hit caught my eye: “Evolution Diet.” I poked around curiously for a while before reaching the unsettling realization that they were selling vegan cat food and advocating a vegan cat diet.

Two things left me confused and indignant. One was the idea that someone would suggest a diet of autotrophs for a mammal who has evolved as an obligate secondary consumer. The other thing was that someone would suggest a diet of autotrophs for a mammal who has evolved as an obligate secondary consumer, and call it an “Evolution Diet”.

I had to document my utter bewilderment. I think I’ll file the first offense under “Animal Cruelty” and the second under “Crimes Against Science”.

With that out of the way, this former-vegan is free to go find some more evolutionarily-appropriate food for kitty. Hare Today, Gone Tomorrow sells frozen chicks, baby rabbits, mice… and even a ground meat/bone/organ sampler pack– it’d be nice to avoid taking scissors to a carcass again in my efforts to teach my cat that animals are food and grains are not.

For now I’ll order the two dozen mice, and continue to supplement with a dry food I feel is much more entitled to reference evolution its name (plug): grain-free Innova EVO, weighing in at 50% protein. It’s turned my cat from scrawny and sickly to sleek and muscular– can’t wait to see what an even better diet will do.

Posting an entry in a new blog that I haven’t really told anyone about yet feels distinctly like talking to myself. Fortunately, that’s never been enough to discourage me.

It seems that I’ve accidentally (read: subconsciously passive-aggressively) let my domains & hosting from high school lapse some time in the past few months. I vaguely recall getting emails to that effect, and ignoring them because it was preferable to acknowledging them. In any case, the clean slate is refreshing.

I spent most of Friday compulsively tweaking this thing to my liking. I’m not really interested in publishing the sordid, angst-filled details of my life anymore. I’ll chalk that up to living, learning, and being post-adolescent.

My new domain name was chosen for a few main reasons: first, because forests and trees (particularly viewed as a single entity– as “forestrees”) are the focus of my academic and occupational ventures, which account for most of my time and energy expenditures. Next, given my great appreciation for puns, double-entendres, and their ilk, the fact that “forestrees” sounds like the plural of “forestry” amuses me to no end. Lastly, getting to the name I’ve given this thing, I’ve always enjoyed the idiom “can’t see the forest for the trees”. From bartleby:

An expression used of someone who is too involved in the details of a problem to look at the situation as a whole…

Details are the bane of my existence. Generally speaking, I don’t give a damn about details except when they illustrate concepts or are vital to understanding concepts. I am, by nature, a big-picture, conceptual sort of person. This is why my lifelong love for the natural world has ultimately manifested itself as a love for ecology and evolutionary biology. I was recently able to utilize this to help me get a job by relaying in an interview, when asked why I wanted the job, how intensely fascinated I’d been by insects as a child, but how volunteering counting aquatic indicator-species insects in grade school had pointed me away from entomology and toward ecology. Sure; I still love insects. But I’ll leave the painstaking specimen-collection and identification for detail people. I care more about what insects can tell me. If I can’t apply it– as a vast overgeneralization– then it doesn’t interest me.

Reading Douglas Hofstadter’s I Am A Strange Loop this year has been fantastically useful for me. The book, regarding human consciousness/self-awareness, is extraordinarily readable, and more awesome than most books for this reason: rather than getting into the nitty-gritty of neuroscience and whatever else that I don’t have time to care about, it provides a series of metaphors that help the reader to understand– by means of providing ways to think about in terms of more easily-understandable things– how “I” can arise from the extremely complex physical nature of the human brain. Minds and Brains‘ summary is excellent. The careenium metaphor provided by Hofstadter is particularly useful. From the above link:

The point of Hofstadter’s metaphor is relatively simple. He wants you to imagine a scenario where the brain (Careenium) could be seen in two different perspectives. One perspective, which comes naturally to scientists, is reductionist. That is, one could in principle view all the activities of the Careenium in terms of the tiny simms bouncing around, acting in accordance with well-known laws of physics. On the other hand, one could take could the high-road, and view the system in terms of the larger simmballs and their macroscopic, representational properties.

To summarize myself, I am a scientist who cares more about the simballs than the simms, while maintaining a profound appreciation for the simms. As a Discordian, I thrive on viewing things from as many (often seemingly-conflicting) perspectives as possible.

I can see the forest for the trees. But I can also see the forest for the forest, see the trees for the forest, and see the trees for the trees.

One last quote, and I will end my rambling [see header] introductory post. I encountered this years ago through Discordia, though I know it has origins elsewhere. I feel it accurately sums up my view of everything. (Or not.)

“All affirmations are true in some sense, false in some sense, meaningless in some sense, true and false in some sense, true and meaningless in some sense, false and meaningless in some sense, and true and false and meaningless in some sense.”

And with that, I’m going to make myself some lemonade, scratch behind my cat’s ears, and read a book.