Movie of the Year 1993

We were watching hummingbirds (more appropriately known as nature's embodiment of the sugar rush) when we were descended upon by a summer storm (more appropriately known as the temporary misplacement of an entire damned river). Lightning struck the ground about a hundred yards off to one side; not having signed up to learn the effects of electrical currents on biological systems, we bolted for the cars.

I got a foot in one door, slipped, pulled the rest of myself in, slammed the door shut. Seconds later the car was still shaking from a thunderclap.

From the front seat, someone said, This is some Jurassic Park shit going on right here.

Another student ran past our window towards the next van. I decided to run an experiment in our car. Don't move! I shouted. It can't see you if you don't move!

Result: hearty, sincere laughter.

I held up my iPod. I have the soundtrack to Jurassic Park on—

My hand was suddenly empty. Oh my God, Rex, we're putting that on right now.

My new nickname is Rex, apparently. I guess it's about time.

We listened for a while as the river falling from the sky decided that this would be a good place to mill about. We watched as a chicken crossed the road for reasons only it could know.

It can't see you if you don't move, someone chuckled. What kind of a stupid predator does that? How would it ever be able to see prey?

I shook my head. Forget prey. How was the T. rex in the movies able to see the cars?

The chicken clucked outside as I considered the difference between biologists and philosophers.

Quickthoughts

There are nights when, as you lay down to end the day, you know that you're not laying in the same place as the one where you laid down the night before. The weight of some new experience displaces the orbit of your world. You know that when you wake up you'll be seeing things from a new viewpoint.

I've now heard the chorus of toad calls filling vast expanses of desert. I've seen the martial discipline of ants invading their neighbors. I've watched iridescent hummingbirds struggle against gravity during a summer downpour. I've laughed in delighted surprise at a bat doing a doggy paddle across a swimming pool.

This is the world as it exists just beyond our peripheral vision. You can see it if you tilt your head just a fraction of an inch to one side--but always at the expense of seeing something else. How can anyone not be intrigued?

Scenes from a desert puddle

Words simply cannot describe how incredible this event was, so pictures will have to do.

Kinds of poop I've seen recently

1) Cow

2) Bird

3) Lizard

4) Human

5) Owl

6) Unidentified predator

7) Horse

8) Kangaroo rat

9) Canid (coyote or domestic dog)

The man who designed Ronald McDonald just fed me an ant

...shall inherit the Earth

By this point into the trip, we've all become fairly well-integrated into the Research Station's small society of scientists and volunteers. The story has begun and introductions ended—sadly. I cling to the belief that people are, all else being equal, inherently good. When a researcher's face brightens up upon his being asked to describe his work, my grip on that belief gets a little stronger.

The population of the Research Center attended a lecture about the evolution of mimicry on Thursday night. Our lecturer took the occasional glance outside while speaking. The talk ended; question-and-answer began. Rain began to fall outside. The lecturer began to seem anxious. I glanced over to his wife and saw her flanked by two young children. They strained their necks trying to look at the screen of the iPad she used.

The last question was asked and answered. Our lecturer apologized for the quick escape that he was inevitably about to make, then nodded over towards his wife and children. Of course he wants to get his kids to bed, I thought.

His wife held up her iPad, showing a weather map. We don't want to miss the toads, he said. Thank you, have a good night. Half the crowd ran out of the room...and almost immediately returned, laptops in town. Three groups, each with just enough people to fit into a car, congregated around glowing screens.

Here's what I know: spadefoot toads are desert dwellers. Deserts, however, are not particularly hospitable to amphibians the amphibian lifestyle, which requires water in which eggs are laid and young grown to maturity. The spadefoot toads resolve this problem by burying themselves under known water sources and avoiding the sun until a good heavy rain comes, at which point they digs themselves up, have a good go at it, and lay their eggs before the newly-fallen water disappears. Biological clocks can run pretty fast sometimes.

Here, people look at the red spots on a weather map and talk excitedly about the possibilities of a toad orgy. Here, the legion of bugs crawling over every wall, ceiling, and floor are greeted with questions about taxonomy rather than the bottom of a boot. Here, a hummingbird gets the paparazzi-level attention normally reserved for people who play make-believe for a living.

I'd still clean up in Star Wars Trivial Pursuit, though.

4000 words

Unmanifold

I wish that I could say that Bono woke me up at 5:15 this morning, but if I did I'd be lying. It wasn't my iPod connected to the alarm clock, and so consciousness was inflicted upon me by some crooner only Jessie can identify.

At 5:34, I got into a cab. It pulled up in front of the American Airlines terminal at 5:55. The lines in front of the security desks were long, so I worried about finding my way to gate B34 by 6:30, when the flight began boarding. Takeoff was at 7:00, on schedule; we landed at 8:11, Chicago time. We pulled into a gate at 8:53, leaving me seven minutes to deal with the physiological effects of a large cup of coffee before boarding a plane to Tuscon at 9:00.

Space and time are part of a continuum. When one is cramped, the other feels similarly so. Packing my bags had amounted to a failed rebellion against the law that two physical objects cannot occupy the same place. Hearing a security guard demand that liquid containers be removed for inspection made me feel like a Roman prisoner, forced to reenact my folly in front of a mocking Colosseum crowd as punishment for ever chafing against the governing forces in the first place.

***

We landed, we gathered, we piled into a van, we drove off. We arrived at the research station two hours later and had dinner, then made formal introductions.

See you tomorrow, the director said, enjoy the evening. The sun was still out.

What to do?

Orientation: what time is it? someone asked. My watch says eleven thirty, so that makes it...

Three hour difference...

My God, it's that early?

It feels like it ought to be past midnight or something.

The sun set, and so came time to go exploring. Four of us grabbed flashlights and walked ninety degrees from civilization.

I'm not sure how far we walked. It felt like some great distance, but the later trek back took no time at all. On a few occasions we heard noises—something just out of tune with the crickets' background theme—and turned off our flashlights, shifting all mental power from vision to hearing. Everything would go completely black. The trail became a page completely covered in ink: billions of potential stories that would be told if we just threw a little white in between the right letters. After the sound failed to repeat itself, we would turn our flashlights back on, and just enough of the world in front of us would be made actual and real enough for us to go.

After a while we decided that we should go back to find our beds. There was nothing about where we were, nor was it any particular time. It just seemed like something else to do.

Labor pains

It would seem that I conceived this blog eight months ago to the day. Human gestation periods being what they are, I should probably be permitted another month to develop things, and I certainly don't have much of value to write at the moment; unfortunately, the universe seems to take the Platonic view that no human thing is of serious importance.

There's nothing like writer's block to start a bold, clichéd new writing venture.

In six hours, I leave to study animal behavior in the wild; I'm not yet asleep because I've spent the past two hours trying to come up with something profound to write here. We'll all have to settle for this: if you're looking for a way to keep tabs on my continued existence through the next ten days, then you've come to the right place.