botanizing

Blue shirts

I woke to snowy light and rose quickly this morning.  This was a travel day.  I’ve let the food supply dwindle, but there was a cup of yoghurt left in the refrigerator, which is where I reached after I flipped the hot pot switch for tea water.  The snowfall was furious, which I knew would be a frustration.  After gulping the yoghurt, I took the tea to shower then dressed for travel.  Blue jeans, an ironed blue Oxford shirt, and a warm sweater.

There was over a foot of fresh snow that still needed to be shoveled.  I began to excavate a path from the back of the house to my driveway.  I scooped-up the center of the drive and then worked the sides, but it was slow going this morning.  There was too much snow.  My scoops were short and the throws tiring.  We have been in nearly continous blizzard for a month. The light, dry snows of early December have now turned wet and heavy. My snow berms are high and the throws grow harder.  As I cleared the end of the driveway, the son of a neighbor asked if I would like for him to do my driveway.  This was very kind and pleasing, and I told him that I would pay if he would help me clear my driveway because I needed to get to the airport.  The young man and I shoveled for 30 minutes, and I was happy to give him $20.

The shoveling had made me not only tired but also sweaty.  Why had I foolishly showered before shoveling?  My shirt was thoroughly wet.  I took it off the shirt and toweled dry, then went to the closet for a clean, dry blue shirt. 

After changing, I put on my backpack, looped a lightweight coat over my arm for the warmer Southeast, grabbed bills for the post office in one hand, and lugged my suitcase down the steps in the other hand.  Everything went in the truck, which I started, and then began to sweep the snow from the windows.  Driver’s window, canopy windows, front window, and as I reached, trying not to step in deep snow, I plunged my belly against the brown slush of the front fender.  This left a broad, sash-like smear of brown across the front of my blue shirt.  So I turned off the truck, unlocked the house and went back into the house to change into my third blue shirt of the morning.

Finally, I was back in the truck and in four-wheel drive backing up the hill out of the driveway.  I was trying not to hit the neighbor whose plume of snowblower tossed snow I could see.  And trying not to hit the car long-parked and now nearly a ski-able mound of snow opposite the end of my driveway.  [Let me emphasize the perilous position of this car directly behind my slippery, uphill driveway where it is largely invisible to my mirrors.]

I backed into the single track that had been plowed earlier in the street.  I needed gas, cash, more breakfast, and a mailbox, but I really needed to get to the airport.  I gave up all ambition except the gas.  At the first gas station where I stopped, nothing was working, and my turn to the next gas station was blocked by a truck accident.  I headed on to the airport without filling-up.  Fortunately, the traffic was light and at 40 mph I made good time, reaching the airport about 40 minutes before my flight.  I grabbed another cup of tea, went for the self-service check-in, and left my checked-bag at the ticket counter.  In the security line, I finished the tea.  Once inside the small airport’s secure gate area, I discover that my flight has been delayed for at least an hour, which was a good opportunity to take care of a need for my next travel.

My flight to Salt Lake City was uneventful, and I had lunch or dinner.  A kind gate agent moved me into an exit row seat, and I waited for my next delayed flight.  We boarded about an hour late, then waited nearly an hour to be de-iced.  After we moved to the de-icing station, the captain told us that the de-icing truck had run-out of stuff and needed a fill-up, and so we waited.  After the de-icing began, it stopped quickly.  The de-icing truck had broken-down, and so we waited for another de-icing truck.  We were about two hours late by the time we zipped down the runway, and the captain forecast an arrival in North Carolina after midnight. 

It was after midnight when we landed and 1.00 a.m. when I checked into my hotel in Durham.
My first meeting for the morning was scheduled for 8.00 a.m., which is, of course, 5.00 a.m. on the West Coast, where I know that my biological clock will still be hung like the blue shirts in my closet.

Feather snow

We have feather snow.  The eight inches that fell last night have a goose down top.  The flakes lay lightly in jumbles, making fans that mimic down feathers.  The spines of the flakes, lodged in icy lattices, are like the soft, plumaceous barbs of feathers. 

*

The snow does not shovel like feathers.  My back screams.  Each scoop goes shortly before I need to lift and toss.  My arms strain.  The piles of snow are already high.  New snow has fallen nearly every day for over a week.  Long berms of snow line the shrubs along my drive from the daily shoveling.  The snow piles grow, and the shoveling time each day grows, too.

Icicle

The cold was sharp in the winter of 1964-65 when I was six years old.  The snow was over a foot deep on a day in January when I walked downtown for a haircut. 

By this time, I had been walking to town by myself for at least two years.  I would go for milk or thread or some other item for my mother.  I walked to town for a haircut each month. Harley Graham had a barbershop on Main Street, which ran perpendicular to the river.  Harley’s shop had striped barber poles on each side of the front window.  The window was frosty in the cold winter.

Harley was an old man, at least 50, when I was a child.  His own thin hair, combed across his head, was held in place by a green visor that he wore at work.  He clipped, scissors in one hand and comb in the other, as he talked to men who sat in the line of chairs opposite the barber chair and the wall-length mirror behind it.  The men were not always waiting for haircuts, they came to the barbershop for a few minutes of conversation.  They would step in from the cold and shiver as they sat in one of the chairs.  Harley would greet each one of them, and they would talk for a few minutes.  In this winter they talked about the cold.  They didn’t talk to me, although if Harley and I were alone, he would hum a stream of sentences directed less at me than at his own thoughts.  Harley was a talker.

Downtown was not far from our house.  I crossed the railroad tracks and walked down the low hill to the end of our block, turned left at the Latter Day Saint’s church to walk another block, where I turned right at the corner of highway 2, where the Schakels had a large house.  Only two more blocks from there, I would cross the highway to the center of town, where the barbershop was located next to the Gamble Store in the middle of Main.  The walk took ten minutes each way and the haircut no more than 20 minutes, unless I had to wait for someone else to be finished.

This day, I was gone for well over an hour.

As I had walked down the block from the Schakels’ house, I saw huge stalactite-like icicles hanging from the lip of the roof of Rueben Mohr’s front porch.  Some of these icicles were nearly five feet long and thick as a man’s leg.  I was awed by them.  I wanted one of those icicles.  I studied the icicles on my way to my haircut and, while Harley clipped my hair, I thought about ways to collect one.

I have always been a collector, especially from nature but also of books, drawings, photographs, and most anything else that has an appealing shape or texture.  Never before this day had I tried to collect an icicle.  I had often popped icicles from overhangs, but those had been for the purpose of crunching with my teeth to feel the ice on my lips and cold melt water run over teeth.  The icicles on Rueben Mohr’s house were not to crunch, they were to have.

I was determined to have one of these icicles. They were huge.  I tried jumping up to them but couldn’t come close to their tips.  Next I tried climbing up to them.  The Mohr’s porch had half a wall.  I thought I could climb onto the wall to the icicles, but the overhang of the roof extended far enough out from the wall that I couldn’t reach them.  I resorted to snowballs.  I threw snowball after snowball.  The few that hit the icicles had no effect.  Most crashed softly against the front of the Mohr’s house.

I don’t know how long Rueben Mohr had been watching me.  He came out of his house, and we talked about the icicles.  He said he should have knocked them off.  They were dangerous.  “Wait a minute,” he said and went back into his house.  He came out with a broom.  When he poked at the icicles they didn’t budge.  Finally, he used the broom like a baseball bat and whacked one icicle.  It cracked from the roof and broke into pieces when it hit the ground.  That one wouldn’t serve my purposes.  When he whacked the next one, it came as smoothly from the roof as a baby tooth comes from a child’s mouth.  The icicle landed sideways in snow.  It was nearly whole and nearly as tall as me.  I thanked Rueben, and hugged the icicle to my body as I walked away.

Carrying the icicle was clumsy and cold.  I went slowly.  The icicle melted against me.  I stumbled once and dropped it, breaking several inches from its tip. I tried to drag it.  It kept slipping from my cold hands.  It took forever to go the two blocks to our street.  I carried the icicle across my chest, going as fast as I could.  I had to stop to rest.  Finally, I made it home.

“Where have you been?” my mother said.  “I’ve been worried about you.”

I told her the story of the icicle.  “What are you going to do with it?” she asked.

Wind's ice

I lean between the haw’s branches to take a bite.  A wing of ice holds along the windward side of the branches.  The ice has built through the night and is now encrusted with snow, which still blows horizontally across the exposed ridge.  Careful of the haw’s thorns, I take a second bite of the ice blade.  It tastes like a circus snowcone, one sweetened by wind.

Cloud Chamber

Gray-brown mud is stiff under my feet, although the trail is not yet icily hard; frost has infiltrated the surface of the mud, leaving give to deeper layers.  The mud is the firmest part of the world. 

Fog has descended.  Where light would be, there is now texture.  I feel the cloud sweep across my cheeks.  The cloud is not like mist; instead, it is particulate.  Alpha particles, I think.  My mind sweeps the forest into a cloud chamber.  This nucleated cloud could consist of alpha particles, bound protons and neutrons, zigging and zagging in a kind of Brownian motion, taking them forth and back at sharp angles until those lost atomic nuclei bang my cheeks.  I look for their signature paths:  broad, straight streaks as the alpha particles rebound and short, curved arcs for electrons.  There are no light streaks in this fog, only a stretch of imagination.

Cover Story

The new issue of Washington State Magazine has a cover story on our university’s natural history museums.  It’s a wonderful article by science writer Cherie Winner and includes material on and photographs from the Ownbey Herbarium, which I direct.

The Book Shoppe, Grangeville

BING BONG!  The electronic syllables of a surveillance system sound my transgression.  I enter The Book Shoppe in Grangeville, Idaho.  Hair and shoulders up, ruffed by the warning I’ve tripped, I look for watchers watching me.  No one is here.

The electronic chords make me think about the pleasures of entering bookstores.  I like to enter quietly.  The proprietor behind the counter might nod or quietly say hello when I come in.  I like bookshops that are quiet enough to hear jazz or Bach playing quietly, unobtrusively in the background.  I like the delight in seeing a broad table arrayed with books just beyond the door.  The BING BONG! throws me off. 

Bells fit a bookshop.  If the proprietor wants to have time in the back room between customers, then a few bells on the door seem appropriate for a bookshop.  Why even a string strung from the door along the ceiling, hung here and there with a few bells, to reach into the back room where more bells could jingle, signaling the arrival of a browser or even a customer, would be a welcoming sound in a book store.  These would be light tinging dinging tinkling bells, nothing even approaching a clangorous cow bell would be reasonable.

The proprietress, a smiling woman who has fair hair, comes from the back.  “May I help you?” she asks.

“I’m just looking,” I say.

The Book Shoppe is bright, and there are not too many books.  The balance that a small town bookshop must achieve is surely difficult.  Investment in inventory must be limited by the low number of customers, and the selection must cater to local tastes, while also offering nuggets that lure exploratory readers.  The small town in Iowa in which I grew-up had no bookshop, and a place like Grangeville’s Book Shoppe would have been a wonderful opportunity to me as a child.  The few books, probably no more than 100 at one time, in my hometown's drugstore were held on a turning metal rack that stood in the front window.  I began building my personal library from that metal rack’s selection.  The selection in The Book Shoppe far exceeds 100 books, and someone has clearly given good attention to the titles.

The Book Shoppe has books on side shelves and two middle rows, a typical arrangement for a long store.  I walk to the shelves on the right, where I find memoirs and biographies.  Books of poetry are stacked on top of the shelves, as if set aside after-thoughts.  I pick up an illustrated volume of Keats and flip through the pages.  This would be a fun book to have, but I put it back on the shelf.  A paperback copy of James Wright’s Above the River:   The Collected Poems, its cover a little faded and worn from sliding against book after book for many years, gets my attention.  I take it from the stack on the top of the bookcase.  The Wright may have been on a shelf here nearly since its publication.  A square white sticker on the cover reads “PP 6/94 $15.00.”  I have another, slimmer edition of Wright’s collected poems, but I keep Above the River in my hand as I look at other books. 

BING BONG!  An older gentleman comes in and goes to the counter to ask the proprietress a question.

After looking through the fiction selection, I walk to the opposite side of the store, where there are books of regional history and guides.  The regional history interests me, and, if I were in a serious buying mood, I would probably take a handful.  A guide to hot springs in the Pacific Northwest tempts me.  I thumb through it twice.  Check the contents to see the locations.  I begin to daydream about hot springs.  I know a woman who likes hot springs.  I must stop this. 

My professional and book-hunter sides return when I see two copies of Ray Davis’s Idaho flora.  The flora is long out-of-print, and the taxonomic nomenclature is out-of-date, but it could be a fun volume to have.  The price penciled in each copy is $135.00, which is more than ten times their worth—such money would be better spent on hot springs fantasies.

I take the copy of Wright’s collected poems to the till.  “Thank you,” I say to the proprietress after the transaction.

BING BONG!

Knee to knee

We are knee to knee.  “Business trip?” she asks me.  I sit in the front row of the small airplane, and the flight attendant sits facing me.  We are close, and our knees nearly touch.  The plane’s engines engage, their tone tightens and their drone turns guttural as the rpms rise.  The flight attendant straps in.

“I’ve been asked to speak at a botanical garden near Los Angeles,” I tell her. 

She takes a moment to digest this idea.  “What are you going to talk about?” she asks.

Now it’s my turn to hesitate.  How do I tell a flight attendant that I plan to talk about the role of serial homology in evolutionary innovation?

“The evolution of flowers,” I tell her.

Hesitation returns to her.  I see the syllables clink through her thoughts.

“I have a petunia,” she says, “but it looks more like a carnation.  Is that what you mean?”

We are quickly at a cross road in this conversation.  Why can’t I just say yes?  Those kinds of variations in nature, I could say, provide the raw material for natural selection, which either selects against the variant or allows it to persist, reproduce, and become the material basis for further diversification.  I know I can’t take that road.  Instead, I take a road full of dangerous curves. “That’s probably a genetic modification made by a plant breeder rather than evolution in nature,” I say. 

My biologist’s soul itches uncomfortably as I speak.  All of the artificial selection data gathered by Charles Darwin as evidence for the creative possibilities of selection, whether natural or artificial, scrapes against my answer.  And, of course, there are all of the fascinating new results from developmental genetic studies that have used variants like the flight attendant’s carnation-like petunia to understand the genetic basis of floral forms and the molecular basis of evolutionary transformation.

“You mean like a wildflower,” the flight attendant says.

“Yes, they are wildflowers.”  I grow slightly more comfortable, thinking that I won’t need to explain my research in any more detail.

“I used to go on Sierra Club hikes,” she says.  “Not so much anymore since I’ve gotten older.  But there was a guy who would point out all these different wildflowers.”

My cheeks flush.  I’m that kind of guy.

“Some of the wildflowers smelled like dirty socks,” she says.  “What were those flowers?” she asks and looks directly into my eyes, expecting a good answer.

I have no idea where in the world or in what kind of environment this woman encountered bad smelling flowers.  I could ask, but instead I answer her promptly and keep my eyes linked to her eyes.  “Jacob’s ladders,” I say.  “They are also called sky pilots and even skunk leaf because of the strong smell.  They are common in the mountains.”

She looks dubious.  “Jacob’s ladders,” she repeats.  Her hard gaze continues to hold my eyes.  “What kind of plants do you study?” she asks.

This question was so much easier in the years when I worked primarily on hydrangeas; otherwise in my 30 years of research on plant evolution, I have seldom worked on any plants that are remotely familiar to the lay population.

“They are probably not plants you’ve seen,” I say.

“What do they look like?” she asks.

I describe the flowers, feeling suddenly challenged to find words that are not technical.  I use the word stamens, and I can tell by her look that this was a mistake.

“Are the like roses or daisies?”  she asks.

I want to hug her.  I want to thank her for giving me a multiple-choice test that acknowledges her range of knowledge.

“Roses,” I say.

She says, “I’ve heard that flowers were made by God for the enjoyment of people.”

I smile and nod and open my book.

Cold duct

On the backside of the hill where I walk there is a hollow of shrubs in the middle of conifer forest.  The hollow falls in a shallow V from a ridge, and it serves as a cold air duct.  The cold winds that sweep along the ridge from the west slip into the duct to shoot over this hollow.  In early spring, snow persists here despite the absence of trees.  In fall, the hollow harbors the warning of winter.  A chill gust of cold now comes down the slope’s duct.  This afternoon, when temperatures have reached into the 50s, I find the morning’s frost persists in the hollow.  Small plants, still green where they are protected by taller, dry grasses that insulate the margin of the trail, are rimmed by ice crystals.  The edges of leaves have jagged and glistening constructions that seem almost like metal.  I put the back of my fingers against the icy leaves and feel the sharp sensation of the coming winter.

Bird chimes

There are wind chimes in the trees but no houses or people here where I walk near the end of a long, dry ridge.  I look in the trees for the chimes and find them.  They flutter at the tips of branches.  Irregular, sharp, and light, I begin to hear gyp gyp . . . gyp . . .  gyp, and those calls mix with the chaffing of wings against needles and scraping of toes against bark.  I have mistaken bird sounds for chimes.

A cone of a Douglas fir is tossed to the ground, where it crunches against the wiry, dry grasses.  I get my binoculars from my pack.

The birds are Red Crossbills at work harvesting seeds from the cones of a Douglas fir.  The crossbills maneuver at the tips of branches—there is a flash of wing and a body flips.  They slip upside down, sideways, head twisting at a cone as their bodies bob on the thinnest branches.  The birds poke and pull seeds.  When a cone comes loose, the crossbill tosses it away.

The flock flies—lifting nearly all at once—as I watch.  Hurried gyp gyp gyp from different quarters of the tree.  There is a flash of buff bellies, glints of red, orange, and yellowish green against the sun as they wheel and fly away.  It’s quiet now, except the wind—the chimes have flown.