A Mommy Brain Fart – Is There Anything Sweeter?

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The brain fart is a well-known phenomenon, and one that I think most parents of young children will understand perfectly. After all, they don’t get enough sleep, and find the demands of parenting young children to be infinitely more difficult than they ever could have imagined.

But this brain fart of mine was particularly relevant because of its timing. I am definitely not the parent of a young child. In fact, tomorrow is the 20th anniversary of the day my life changed forever, and the greatest teacher I have ever known came into the world.

My son was born at 9:30 PM, November the 10th, 1992. Tomorrow, he’s no longer a teenager.

The brain fart began with an invitation, a rather special one. It was to attend a holiday party at the Brown Palace Hotel in Denver, from a foreign consulate. This was special to me for a lot of reasons. I work as the Chief Operating Officer for a company that has my husband as CEO. And it’s his party, this company is. I’m definitely there in a supporting role.

If you know me, you that supporting roles are not my thing, really. I love what we’re doing with the company, so I’m definitely engaged. But sometimes it’s hard watching my spouse travel to all the corners of the globe while I do the financial analyses.

This invite came to me because I hosted a visit from the Foreign Trade Office of this country earlier this year, while the spouse was off on one of his island hops (it might have been Africa – I’m not at all sure). We had quite a nice visit, talked about the potential for future work there, and then it was done.

So – finally – I get a little “good attention” and my name on the invite.Then I graciously invited my spouse, who will accompany me.

As I was writing this down in my calendar, a little cloud passed through my mind. We were both going, so then, what about the children? (We are a blended family with two sons, very close in age.)

The entire thing took only a second, if that, for me to realize that both “children” live out of state, attending college. They are young men. And my young man turns 20 years old tomorrow.

There’s something about those decadal birthdays… I began to think about all the young women and men I mentored, and how long the 20 years represents in their lives. Many of them are parents themselves, now. They are no longer students or postdocs but professors or senior officials.

And me, I’m an empty nester free to attend anything I darn well please, without thinking of how it will impact the children, and whether they will be OK that night without me. Truth be told, it’s been quite a few years since they did need me that way.

I’m mostly loving my new life. But I also loved that moment where, for a microsecond, I was needed.

Happy birthday, Daniel. When I brought you home, I told myself to make sure to pay attention, because you’d only ever be 1 or 2 or 3 days old once. And I do remember that. Many other days, however, are long forgotten.

My favorite essay on parenting is this one from Erma Bombeck, published on January 29, 1969.

One of these days, you’ll shout, “Why don’t you kids grow up and act your age!” And they will. Or, “You guys get outside and find yourselves something to do . . . and don’t slam the door!” And they won’t.

You’ll straighten up the boys’ bedroom neat and tidy: bumper stickers discarded, bedspread tucked and smooth, toys displayed on the shelves. Hangers in the closet. Animals caged. And you’ll say out loud, “Now I want it to stay this way.” And it will.

You’ll prepare a perfect dinner with a salad that hasn’t been picked to death and a cake with no finger traces in the icing, and you’ll say, “Now, there’s a meal for company.” And you’ll eat it alone.

You’ll say, “I want complete privacy on the phone. No dancing around. No demolition crews. Silence! Do you hear?” And you’ll have it.

No more plastic tablecloths stained with spaghetti. No more bedspreads to protect the sofa from damp bottoms. No more gates to stumble over at the top of the basement steps. No more clothespins under the sofa. No more playpens to arrange a room around.

No more anxious nights under a vaporizer tent. No more sand on the sheets or Popeye movies in the bathroom. No more iron-on patches, rubber bands for ponytails, tight boots or wet knotted shoestrings.

Imagine. A lipstick with a point on it. No baby-sitter for New Year’s Eve. Washing only once a week. Seeing a steak that isn’t ground. Having your teeth cleaned without a baby on your lap.

No PTA meetings. No car pools. No blaring radios. No one washing her hair at 11 o’clock at night. Having your own roll of Scotch tape.

Think about it. No more Christmas presents out of toothpicks and library paste. No more sloppy oatmeal kisses. No more tooth fairy. No giggles in the dark. No knees to heal, no responsibility.

Only a voice crying, “Why don’t you grow up?” and the silence echoing, “I did.”

Thank you for making me laugh so many times, Erma, and Daniel, thank you for being a part of my life. For one sweet moment, a brain fart moment but a good one, I held you close.

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My Kinda Sorta Participation in NaNoWriMo 2011

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One of the huge social changes that have happened because of the Internet is that one person’s idea – odd or otherwise – can become a phenomenon. National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, is such a phenomenon. Chris Baty started this project in July 1999 with 21 writers in the San Francisco Bay Area. In 2000 it was moved to November in order to take “advantage” of the normally miserable weather the Bay area experiences in that month.

The ground rules are thus: one must begin an entirely new novel-writing project, and to complete a manuscript of at least 50,000 words entirely within the month of November.

I am currently writing two novels, and one of them is a new project (but not completely new – I am over the 10,000 word mark). I decided to use the “collective vibe” of NaNoWriMo to get 50,000 words written during November 2011. But I’ve backed off on that. It’s not realistic for me.

So – my personal goal is to get at least 1,000 words a day written on my novel during November 2011. My hat goes off to the brave (?) souls willing to give this a try. Me – I know that even if I could do this, I’d produce pure crap. Heck, I’m a bit worried that’s what I’m doing anyway. Over 200,000 people are giving it a shot.

It’s going to take a lot for me to write 1000 words a day. I had set that as a goal for myself, and then realized that 500 was more like it. I do, after all, have a day job, and yes, I enjoy my life. Since I’ve started keeping track, my average is 545 words/day. That included one zero, so the average for the days when I actually wrote anything was 654. A long way from 1000.

So here I go. I’ll try to post snippets of progress here, but I don’t want to distract myself. I registered with NaNoWriMo, but have realized that since I’m outside their rules, I can’t actually participate.

1000 words a day. To infinity… And beyond!

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Microhistory – Remembering the Do Drop In and the Brevard Rosenwald School

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Historian Charles Joyner has said that microhistory, which is the intensive historical investigation of a well-defined unit, such as a single event, a community, a family, or an individual, aspires to “search for answers to large questions in small places.” History is all around us, but most of it is lost forever, of no consequence, merely the imprint of time’s inevitability. I recently had a small and personal glimpse into this field of study, and I suspect that many microhistorical investigations begin from some personal interest. For example, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Thomas Powers spent years meticulously documenting the events surrounding the killing of Crazy Horse, which Random House published as a 467-page book  in 2010. But the story behind how Powers came to write the book is almost as interesting as the book itself. As a 12-year-old boy, Powers visited Fort Robinson in Nebraska, where Crazy Horse was killed with a bayonet. The story haunted Powers, who wondered why Crazy Horse had been killed. Powers was in his 70th year of life when the book was finally published.

Although Powers’ intensive study was driven by personal curiosity that stayed with him for over 50 years, Crazy Horse was a key historical figure, and his death has historical significance. My own brush with microhistory was on a much more personal scale. But it showed me that all around us are stories that have lessons and significance, even if they had no impact beyond the communities where they occurred and the people who were there.

I grew up in the south during the years of desegregation. Which means that I was also there, and remember all too well, both segregation as well as the initial fear and mistrust that occurred when schools were integrated. And I remember, although I hate to even say it, but it happened, that every town had a section that we called “colored town”. It wasn’t considered rude to say this – it was how we spoke. It was the reality of our lives, both those of us who lived outside colored town and those who lived within. Blacks and whites sometimes worked together, although this was almost always blacks working for whites, but at night the two races separated into well-defined communities, with their own businesses, schools, and health care. My glimpses into colored town were rare. I saw it from the outside only.

Beginning in the summer of 1965 and continuing for 7 years beyond that, I spent most of my summers in a girl’s camp just outside the town of Brevard, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina. Although Brevard has long been a vacation destination, it’s also Appalachia, with all the isolation, poverty, and distinctive culture that implies. For me, a child of northern Florida, Brevard was a world apart. We lived in our isolated camp, where most days there were few cultural clues to our setting. But they were there, even when we were in camp. The pale-faced, poorly fed boys who lived in a shack near the archery range could sometimes be spotted – like monkeys in the trees they stared at us as we did at them. There were many legends about the Brown boys, but the reality was they were poor – bad skin, bad teeth, no-shoes-torn-clothes poor – and ignorant. One look at them screamed malnutrition and neglect. I also remember being in riding class, where we were trained in formal English equitation, while I watched the farmer across the road guide the plow his mule was pulling. Even as a child, I was keenly aware of the contrast, of the sense that I was in a place where two universes existed side by side.

But it was when we left camp, for various trips and activities, that the differences were most clear. And, depending on where a particular trip had been or was going, we often drove through Brevard’s “colored town”. And I stared. I wondered. Who were these people, and what were their lives like? What did they do each day? What did they talk about around their dinner tables? Did they have dinner tables?

I have few good visual memories of Brevard in those days. I can only see snapshots of places and events, and I can make little coherent out of those. But there is one place that is clearly in my mind – the Do Drop In. My memory is looking out the window of our rattletrap old camp bus. As we turn one particular corner, I pause from the endless singing that begins when the bus pulls out and ends only when it has parked or an adult forces our silence. I always want to see what is happening on this corner, where people gather and where I sense community. There is a two-story wood-frame building, with a porch, and many people are hanging around there, just being together – talking, sitting, playing. I can tell they are there just because it’s where they find each other. In my memory, above the porch, there is the phrase “Do Drop In.” The wood is old and the words are faint, and it mixes poverty along with pride. It is so clever, I think – that I always love to read it. The people are all black, and from the group a teenage boy stares back at the bus. He is unusual, for his hair is the color of light cream and his eyes are light. He is an albino. I learn to look for him, for I have never seen anything like this. Sometimes there is more than one albino, and as I grow older I have a learned a little about recessive genes and small populations, and I wonder about the odds of finding these two albinos here in the world apart, in this corner of Brevard where people hang out on the porch of a place that I call the Do Drop Inn.

The reality of the Do Drop In has remained a part of me. It was so distinctive I just knew that I would one day find a picture of it somewhere, with a caption like, “The Do Drop In was a central part of the black community of Brevard in the 1960s. Across from the Bethel Baptist Church, it was a gathering place, where you could buy a coca-cola and a handful of goober peas, the local name for boiled peanuts.” And there they would be, all those people, maybe even with the albinos in the photo. Maybe I could find their names, figure out what had happened to them, what their future had become. More than once I searched the internet for it, certain that someone, somewhere, would have put that picture up.

I found Do Drop Ins, spelled just that way, in Martinsville, Virigina, Gilbert, West Virginia, Pueblo, Colorado, Mountain City, Tennessee, Knob Noste, Missouri, Beebe, Arkansas, Phoenix, Arizona, Saint Louis, Missouri, New Tazewell, Tennessee, San Antonio, Texas, Findlay, Ohio, Salisbury, North Carolina, and more. But not in Brevard. And, OK, so it turned out the name isn’t nearly as original as my young mind believed. But still – I yearned to see it again.

And that’s when I began to feel that I was chasing after ghosts. I returned to Brevard in summer of 2011 for a camp reunion. I asked a friend who’d attended during my years if she remembered the “Do Drop In”. I spoke of the albinos, and the porch, and the peeling paint. Her response was a wide-eyed, “Are you sure you didn’t dream that?” Hmm… perhaps I had. But I didn’t think so. How could I have been remembering a single dream for nearly 50 years? I was sure that I’d remember the building if I saw it again, even if it were painted or falling apart. So after the reunion ended, I visited all the roads between camp and town, in both directions. And suddenly I saw a building, boarded up, neglected, right on a corner, and my heart knew this building. I did not think that it was the Do Drop In, it was only one story, but I knew I was in the old neighborhood, less than one mile from camp. I knew this was the corner our bus had passed again and again, nearly 50 years ago now.

Finding that building opened a door that led to a corridor that led me to more doors and more answers. I found a nearby sign that referred to the Historic Rosenwald community. Could it be that Brevard’s colored town had been called Rosenwald? Why would a southern black community have a Jewish name? But I had something. I had a building I knew had been there, just around the corner from the Baptist Church. And I had a name – Rosenwald. I had the oddest feeling, standing on that corner looking at that derelict building, as if I could see the ghosts of the people who had gathered there, as if I could hear the laughter of children, that although time had changed this place, taken those people away, that the essence of the events that had happened there remained forever bound to the place. Standing there photographing that building was the beginning of my microhistorical investigation, and how I came to find the larger answers hidden in this small place.

Julius Rosenwald was the head of Sears Roebuck in the early part of the 20th century, and was well known for his philanthropic accomplishments in the Chicago Jewish community. But what is much less well known is that he joined forces with Booker T Washington to build African-American schools in the Deep South at a time when there were none. The model that he used was of matching funds – communities had to raise at least some of the funds themselves. White school boards in the south were not interested in spending money on the education of black children, so often the black communities raised much of the funds themselves, sometimes with help from sympathetic white community members and churches. But always they had to take the lead.

There was no “Rosenwald community” in Brevard in the 1960s, but there was a Rosenwald School, which opened its door in 1916 and closed them in 1966, when the Brevard schools were integrated. There were communities, alright. There was Greasy Corner, Goose Hollow, Frog Bottom, Glade Creek, and French Broad. Greasy Corner, it turned out, was the place of my memory, where Mr. Jip Mills’ store stood, right down from the billiard parlor which, it turned out, was the boarded up building I had recognized and photographed. Greasy Corner was so named because it was near the Transylvania Tanning Company, and the smells included a mix of decaying animal hides and tannic acid, both unpleasant. But the Tanning Company provided employment to many in the black community. Greasy Corner was, just as I remembered, the center of activity, a major gathering place for the 500 or so residents who were excluded from many local businesses.

Dr. Betty Reed, a continuing education instructor at Brevard College, first learned of the Rosenwald School’s existence when she was substitute teaching at an adult education class in Brevard. There were 5 men there that night – 2 black and 3 white, and none of them particularly wanted to do “book work”. So she got them talking about their school days, and what she learned both angered and fascinated her – about the blacks being bused to Hendersonville 20 miles away to attend the black high school there. When the men couldn’t answer all her questions, they encouraged her to contact Mrs. Ethel K. Mills, who, it turned out, was nearly 100 years old by then and once the principal of the Brevard Rosenwald School.

What started as Dr. Reed’s one night of substitute teaching led to the publication of The Brevard Rosenwald School: Black Education and Community Building in a Southern Appalachian Town, 1920-1966. It is part of a series on the history of southern Appalachia, and it is microhistory at its best. In the grand scheme of the world, the events that took place in Transylvania County North Carolina in the early to mid 20th century had no impact. There were no wars, no recessions, nothing to record, that stemmed from events there.

Dr. Reed writes, “Before suburban sprawl dominated the landscape, a suburb existed in the small mountain town of Brevard, North Carolina. Called “Colored Town” by residents, the neighborhood was home to a thriving community of African Americans. Within its confines, supportive family interaction, bustling economic activity, and lively community involvement existed. Of greater importance, the education of children was a tri-institutional effort – a trinity of home, church, and school united to enlighten the community’s children and youth.”

I will write more about the book and the school in a future post, for now I wish to return to the matter of the Do Drop In. My initial research into the Rosenwald area turned up nothing to suggest that such an establishment had ever existed. I began to doubt myself. Perhaps I had dreamed it.

Thanks to the internet, I found an address for Dr. Reed, who I knew had spent many days taking oral histories of the area during her research for the book. I was joyous when she responded to my written letter via email, telling me that she would call all her contacts and see what she could find. Little happened at first – no one could remember it. And then, one day – I received an email from Betty with a quote from Brevard resident and businessman James Outlaw. Betty told me that James had asked her to pass along the message that I was “125% correct” about the Do Drop In. Another resident, Lois Wynn, also remembered it.

But the story kind of ends there. Ms. Wynn thought that it might have been a beauty parlor or barber shop. Now, the odd thing is, that of all the Do Drop Ins I turned up in modern times, one of them is a beauty parlor, and it’s in Salisbury North Carolina, childhood home of both my paternal grandparents. My family goes back to pre-revolutionary days in Salisbury and nearby Spencer. Did I overlap a memory from Salisbury with one from Brevard? Was it possible that both Mr. Outlaw and Ms. Wynn had also traveled to Salisbury and had mixed things up as I had?

I don’t think so. 125% is a high degree of confidence! The strength of my own memory makes me think that James Outlaw and Lois Wynn, both of whom I may well have spotted once upon a time, when our bus drove by Greasy Corner, are right when they say that I’m 125% correct. I do think the wooden 2-story building I remember was not the Do Drop In itself but Mr. Jip Mill’s store, which was a center of the community. The Do Drop In was probably very near there, and my memories have confused which sign was on which building. But it is interesting that no record of the Do Drop In exists anywhere. Dr. Reed checked business directories at the library and made many phone calls. From her investigation, she turned up exactly 3 of us who remember that name. When I had first told Dr. Reed about my interest in the business, she thought that it might well have been a boarding house, as blacks were not able to stay in local hotels, and so local residents often took in boarders.

There is no colored town in Brevard today. I am so glad that the terrible tension that existed in the 1960s is gone from our lives. Racism and inequality are still realities, but we have come so far. I am honored to be one of the few people who remember Greasy Corner, even if I wasn’t part of it.

James Outlaw, it turns out, is the father of one of America’s rising stars – operatic baritone Sidney Outlaw. There among the somewhat ragged crowd on Greasy Corner stood potential that was held down through decades of discrimination, Jim Crow laws, ignorance and hatred. There stood the future father of someone who turns hearts the world over through his beautiful voice.

The albinos – I did not imagine them. They are there, in Dr. Reed’s book, in a picture of the Glee Club. Like me, they too loved to sing, I now know. I hope that someday I learn what became of them.

What is the large question that comes from this small place? Racism is not gone. The Ku Klux Klan has marched in the streets of Brevard in recent memory. There are still inequalities. Blacks are still executed in the south in horrifically unjust numbers. As I wrote this, Troy Davis was executed in Georgia despite over a million signatures begging a stay, with no physical evidence to support his conviction. But there is hope, love, and much progress. It was not so long ago that we lived in separate worlds.

For me, this exercise, which led me to places I’d never imagined I’d go, put me into contact with people I never thought I’d have a chance to know, was deeply personal. I learned that our shared history has meaning, and that we all dreamed of a future where our own children had a chance. I wrote this piece to commemorate the long lost Do Drop In, Greasy Corner and all that it meant to the people who lived there. May our children and grandchildren find their own community, not lose the best of what we had, but turn away the worst and face the future together.

More about the Rosenwald Schools: Documentary film maker Aviva Kempner is currently  raising funds to create a documentary about the Rosenwald School movement. You can learn more about the film and the movement at  http://www.rosenwaldschoolsfilm.org/home.php. Oprah Winfrey, Julian Bond, and Spike Lee are all graduates of Rosenwald schools. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is leading a movement to document the condition of existing Rosenwald school buildings and offering assistance to local communities in restoring the old schools.

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Dancing Molecules, Isoprenes, and Being in Awe

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Dark and silent late last night
I think I might have heard the highway calling
Geese in flight and dogs that bite
Signs that might be omens say I’m going, going
I’m goin’ to Carolina in my mind.

–James Taylor

Except  - this time it’s not just in my mind. How many times over the years I have played this song in my head, wanting to come back “home”, even if I have lived in Colorado my entire adult life. I arrived in Asheville at 5 PM, and by 7 PM I was reminded of why this region was where I was always happiest. I was reminded, vividly, of when I first experienced awe.

Feel free to find it a bit odd that a woman who lives in Boulder, Colorado, which I happen to think is one of the most beautiful cities on the planet, with a lovely home which is literally a 5-minute walk from rugged Rocky Mountain trails where cougar, bear, bobcat, deer, and even an occasional elk regularly roam, would come to North Carolina to hike. And this woman has come here vacation by herself, no less. For that is me – I am the woman from Boulder who has come here to the western Carolina highlands for a solo vacation. Six days by myself.

Ok, not really by myself the entire time. I am here because the summer camp of my childhood, Keystone, in nearby Brevard, is hosting an Alumni Weekend in few days, in honor of its 95th Birthday. Both my mother and my grandmother attended the camp as girls, and I followed in their footsteps – eight wonderful summers, “a freezin’ in the lake and a bakin’ in the sun.” There is no time I have been happier than when I attended camp as a girl – bliss.

So in a few days, I’ll share a cabin with my old pals. We’ll have watermelon races and canoe races and ride our horses through the woods. We’ll sit on the porch and try to remember how to make lanyards. I’ll miss my dear friend Margaret, who can’t come this time. Five years ago she reminded me of how, when we were girls, we’d hold back our horses, then, well, what’s a girl to do when she falls behind the group – why canter to catch up, of course! Now that we’re great big campers, we get served wine and margaritas rather than milk and cookies on the old lodge porch – to make up for the fact that riding makes me very sore these days, I guess.

I was a very lucky camper, because my mother usually also came to camp with me. She worked for the school system, so she had her summers free, and the camp always had a certain number of positions they filled with mothers. Often those mothers, like mine, had been campers in their day. It was truly all in the family. I still stayed in a cabin and did all the usual campers things, but I always liked going and hanging out with mom sometimes.

For those of us who stayed all summer, there were 2-3 days lulls between the shorter sessions. And during those times, my mother often did something special for me. She’d take us on a trip, or maybe my grandparents would come and visit – all the way from Chapel Hill. One of those special places was a visit to the nearby big city – Asheville – and dinner at the Grove Park Inn.

Before tonight, I couldn’t remember much about the Grove Park Inn except that it was made of stone, that it always felt magnificent to walk into the main entry room, and that there was a porch on the back with a view out over the Blue Ridge that was just simply magnificent. I had read about it since then – heard of this famous lodge. I have lived in the Rocky Mountains now for almost 37 years. I have worked up in the high, high country, spectacular tundra landscapes with glaciers and wildness and snowy peaks. The Blue Ridge is so subdued compared to that. But the view from the Grove Park Inn – that is not subdued. It’s breathtaking, but in a gentle way. Maybe I need a new word for it – breathgiving. That’s it. It’s a breathgiving view. But I’m ahead of myself.

I got into town tonight and found my hotel easily. Nothing special about it – I had wanted something inexpensive and easy to find and that’s what I got through Hotwire (and pure luck that it’s within a mile of tomorrow’s destination – Biltmore Estates). I thought about what I should do with my evening – I wasn’t sure. Then a little light clicked on. “Where’s the Grove Park Inn?” I asked. Just a few miles up the road a bit, the clerk told me. I settled into my room and called the Inn, asking about restaurants. They explained my choices, and asked if I’d like a reservation. I was a bit leery, hoping to just go up and poke around a bit, worrying that it would have become too much of a “resort” and not the lovely old stone hotel with the fireplaces that stood taller than me. But they encouraged me to make a reservation, saying they often filled up. I chose the “Sunset Terrace” on the basis of the food choices, not asking much about the view. If I didn’t like it, I’d go downtown and get some good ol’ Carolina BBQ (which I later discovered President Obama had done even when he was staying at the Grove Park Inn, but I also know, now that I came back and read about it, that he and his family loved the Sunset Terrace).

Grove Park Inn, Asheville NC, 5-16-2007

Front Entrance of the Grove Park Inn, with welcoming wooden rockers that I remember sitting in with my mother. (Image via Wikipedia)

As I approached the Inn, there they were – the old rockers. I suppose they’ve been replaced, probably multiple times, in the 40+ years since I was last here, but they looked just the same. I sat down and closed my eyes. The smell, the air, it was all just the same. Mom, were you there next to me? I kind of thought I felt you.

Then I went in, and across the voluminous lobby and through a door, I saw people dining on an outside terrace. And behind them – the hillside dropped away sharply, as if they were on a cliff, and beyond that expanse, the Blue Ridge stretched forever in the distance. I walked over and was gazing at the menu, and for some reason, I assumed this was the other restaurant, the one I’d foregone. Why oh why had I done that, I wondered? It looked very full, but I thought I could probably talk them into a table for me, perhaps if I played my nostalgia hand right. So I said, “I’m not sure if I have a reservation or not. Can you check for me?”

The Sunset Terrace Restaurant is across the main lobby and looks out to paradise. Angels guided me there for dinner and I watched the sunset over the Blue Ridge.

The hostess’ hand ran down the column, and then she looked up and gave me a warm smile. “I’ve been waiting for you. You’re right on time. I have just the place for you.”’

And there I was – on the lovely terrace looking out to heaven – toward Mt. Pisgah. I realized I’d forgotten my camera, but in any case it was one of those views that takes a professional to capture. I don’t know how the Blue Ridge looks like it does. Each mountain is silhouetted against the next, and they really are blue. (According to Wikipedia, the color is from isoprenes being released by the trees. I can check that out later. Something special about these trees, though. The Rockies aren’t blue…)

When I first arrived the sun was still shining, but as I had wonderful food brought to me, much of it harvested from the garden just below us (to my knowledge you cannot order Fried Green Tomatoes in Boulder – so sad!), the light slowly changed, and my breath just became more and more all I was experiencing. I had a locally brewed ale, fried green tomatoes, served with homemade pimento cheese (another childhood delicacy that is rare outside the south), and shrimp with grits (and a lot of cream and bacon and oh my…).

The staff was attentive, the food was a delight, but the Blue Ridge won the evening. I had two books to read – a novel and a Blue Ridge Parkway hiking guide – but I could scarcely tear my eyes away from the view to take the time to read. And the air – the mountain air – it was the perfect temperature. Everything was absolutely perfect.

I’m sure the Inn has changed since my childhood. I can’t find history on when the new wings were built, but I don’t remember them. And the fantastic waterfall they’ve created, that cascades down the hillside from the Sunset Terrace to the spa, I’m sure that’s new. But the view – well – it’s hard to do much with that. The Blue Ridge is over a billion years old. I imagine it’s changed a lot in that time, but in my unmeasurable slice of it – not.

Awe – that is all I can say about the breathgiving view. And suddenly there I was, the memory intact, Sunday evening at Keystone Camp, and we are singing vespers (“Now the day is over, night is drawing nigh. Shadows of the evening steal across the sky.”). The mountains around us are glorious, lifegiving, I feel alive and taken care of, one with everything. I feel awe. I recognize it as awe, and I do not know where the feeling comes from, but I cherish it. I think that my life is perfect, singing vespers as the evening grows dark, and the fireflies begin to do their dance, and I am surrounded by love and beauty. I see the blue mountains in the distance, and in my mind I hear the Biblical phrase, “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.” Perhaps that’s why I must live in Boulder – because I need that help. But my love of the hills – it began as a girl sitting and loving the Blue Ridge, feeling one with these ancient mountains.

That awe, those memories, of perfection, are why I am taking this vacation, and why I will spend the next days hiking, kayaking, and visiting old favorites. I’ll try to write about it, I’d love to do that, but maybe I’ll just be too tired at the end of every day to write. Tomorrow night I’m staying in Pineola, NC, so that I can get an early start on my Grandfather Mountain hike. I really hope I share that with you. Thank you for reading about my day today. As my 7:20 AM airport bus drove across Boulder this morning, I was struck by the beauty of it – breathtaking – and I knew that it was going to be a day of spectacular gifts. For I often drive that same road and never notice – but today – I felt I could see every molecule dancing. Here in Asheville, they like to slow dance, but those molecules are still dancing.

Oh yeah – I said I could never photograph that view, and that’s true. But I found this painting by Jeff Pittman of the view from the Sunset Terrace toward Mt. Pisgah, and I thought it captured the emotion and depth of the scene better than any ever photograph ever could. Enjoy.

View of Mt. Pisgah from the Sunset Terrace at Asheville's Grove Park Inn, painted by Jeff Pittman

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Fox News and Yellow Journalism – Yeah I know it isn’t news that Fox is garbage, but I had to speak up about it

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It started with my Alexa toolbar installed on my Firefox browser, which “feeds me” intriguing headlines. Not a great way to be productive, really. I can ignore it 99.9% of the time. But oh, this one looked just so darn interesting, and I couldn’t see the source, only the headline itself:

Jacqueline Kennedy Reportedly Believed Lyndon B. Johnson Behind JFK’s Assassination

You will note that I did not include a link to the story. Oh sure, I’ve given it to you below. But I don’t want to do anything to make these jerks at Fox News think that they have my attention.

The headline seems to be clearly saying that Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis believed that LBJ was behind her husband’s assassination. Oh sure, there’s that “reportedly” word  in there, but here’s now my fairly logical mind interpreted that – “Kennedy-Onassis actually thought this to be the case, but our excellent news minds here at Fox News don’t believe that rich liberal elite woman in any case, so we’re going to fudge with the word ‘reportedly’.”

But – when you actually read their disgusting non-story, here’s how it goes down:

Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis believed Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was behind the assassination of her husband, according to tapes recorded by the former first lady just months after President John F. Kennedy’s death, the Daily Mail reports.

The emphasis is my own. The Daily Mail is a UK tabloid known for sensationalistic reporting. Look at what Fox is doing – the first part of the sentence will be what the reader internalizes: “Jacqueline Kennedy-Onassis believed Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson was behind the assassination of her husband BIG FAT PERIOD.” The rest of it is discarded by our minds as insignificant trivia. The next clause tells us there are tapes (ah – evidence!), and then what the source was (something we’ve never heard of but now we are – thanks to Fox News).

The tapes, which are set to be released by ABC News, reportedly reveal that Kennedy-Onassis believed then-vice president Johnson, along with businessmen in the South, planned the Nov. 22, 1963, assassination of her husband in Dallas, Texas.

Again, the “reportedly” word is in there, but otherwise we are being told that the tapes will be released and will convince us this is true.

But then… it gets a bit more hairy. Then I start to get confused, because on some level, I am actually paying attention:

“The tabloid reports about the content of the tapes are totally erroneous,” an ABC News spokesperson said in a statement to FoxNews.com. “ABC News isn’t releasing any content from those tapes until mid-September at which point it will be clear how off base these reports are. The actual content of the tapes provide unique and important insight into our recent past from one of the most fascinating and influential First Ladies in American history.”

Huh? What? Wait a minute! But you said… Ah – now I begin to go back and really read what is written. Now I see the word “reportedly” in every statement, relegated to a minor role. Now ABC News, which actually has possession of the tapes, which the Daily Mail apparently does NOT, is saying that the tapes will be of great interest to us, but that the tabloid reports about their content is totally erroneous. Not just a bit off base, but totally erroneous. Strong words, those.

But despite putting this paragraph in there, basically saying that the source who has been in contact with Caroline Kennedy about the tapes, the source that actually knows what is in the tapes, has said that these reports are garbage, Fox News just keeps going!

Kennedy-Onassis thought gunman Lee Harvey Oswald — long believed to be a lone assassin — was part of a larger conspiracy involving Johnson, according to the Daily Mail.

Fox News once again quotes the Daily Mail report as if it were actually from a source called the Holy Grail. More garbage follows, but I’ll stop here and let you read it yourself, if you can stomach it.

The truth is that the appropriate headline for the story might be something like this:

Daily Mail Makes False Claims About Kennedy Tapes, Real Story to be Told in September

This outright perversion of the truth makes me very, very angry. I have been a teacher and a communicator for decades, and if there is any place that integrity is crucial, it is there. This information age that we find ourselves in is such a two-edged sword. Yes, we can get lots of information quickly. But is is trustworthy? How can people know?

The right-wing media has done incredible harm. They will, I am sure, claim that by putting the ABC statement in there they’re covered their backsides, but that doesn’t change the reality – yellow journalism.Cowardice – pure and simple.
Oh yeah – if you want to read this crap for yourself, here’s the link:

http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/08/08/jacqueline-kennedy-reportedly-believed-lyndon-b-johnson-behind-husbands/#ixzz1USUAxnp8

The real story? I am very curious about what’s on those tapes. The sensationalistic garbage about what might be on them is just that.

Taking Ecology to the Next Level: The National Ecological Observatory Network

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“After years of quietly accumulating an expert team in Boulder, a new national science lab has finally been promised the funding necessary to begin fulfilling its mission of creating a web of environmental observatories that will stretch across the country.” Boulder Daily Camera, August 1, 2011.

Take that in – “A NEW national science lab.” That alone is exciting, but for me, who has spent much of my life studying ecology, it’s almost surreal. “…a web of environmental observatories that will stretch across the country.” Goosebumps. This is amazing stuff – beyond amazing. This is our ecological moon shot.

The National Ecological Observatory Network, NEON, received a promise of $434 million of funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) last Monday, August 1. Exactly how and when the $434 million will be spent over the next 5-6 year period is not publicly available, but generally the way these programs work is that there is a staged budget that will be used to build out the network starting immediately, with completion in 2017, and with science beginning immediately. Although I am sure that the press coverage will increase as NEON begins its work, I want to shout it from the rooftops. The significance is hard to fathom without some perspective.

$434 million is a staggeringly large number for an ecology grant. It apparently required Congressional line item approval. But it’s not the number that matters. That’s just the cost to do what the ecology community has been organizing to do for well over a decade. It’s just a number. What’s really impressive here is The Plan and the cooperation. This is the science of ecology finally maturing, right when what they do is badly needed by humankind. There is hope.

Ecology is the study of relationships. It’s about where species live, how they got there, what resources they use, how they compete for those resources, how they interact with each other, how they influence and are influenced by their environment, and more. But it’s never about one single thing. Ecology is often compared to economics, and the two fields have much in common, dealing with complex systems that have many moving parts and interdependencies. Such complex systems can have unexpected outcomes, and they are notably difficult to model and describe. They also both have a great degree of importance to us human beings. To understand our ecosystems is to understand our house. If we don’t take proper care of it, the food we eat, the air we breathe, and the water we drink may not continue to sustain us. This isn’t about ideals – it’s about survival.

Ecology really only came into being as a science in the 20th century, and gained public attention in the 1960’s, when the environmental movement arose. The word “ecology” (“Ökologie”) was coined in 1866 by the German biologist and naturalist Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), from the Greek “oikos”, meaning “house”. So indeed, to understand our ecosystems is to understand our house. Henry Chandler Cowles was among the first Americans to popularize the term. Cowles was a botanist who was fascinated by the sand dunes of Lake Michigan, and carefully worked out that the repeating patterns of vegetation that existed there were related to the age of dunes relative to glaciation. He coined the term “succession” to describe this sequence.

The way in which Cowles taught his students underscores that early ecology was as much about exploration as it was about science. According to an article in Chicago Wilderness Magazine, Cowles’ field ecology course, in 1900, was a 4-week trip that examined one or more regions intensively.

“Soon after signing up, students got an instruction sheet from Cowles that suggested ‘stout tramping shoes’ for all participants and ‘a riding habit made of khaki or other suitable material’ for the women. The women’s outfits guaranteed modesty but were heavy, hot, and hopelessly unsuited for covering rough ground, exploring swamps, or scaling dunes. Sunblock didn’t exist in those days, so students wore sun hats and long sleeves. Insect repellents were said to be ‘heavy on the citronella.’”

As the decades wore on, ecologists came to study process alongside pattern. The early plant ecologists often inferred process from the pattern – for example Cowles’ focus on the sand dunes, and his student William Skinner Cooper who described a similar successional sequence at Glacier Bay in Alaska – a repeating pattern of species related to the recovery of a landscape following deglaciation. But it wasn’t the deglaciation per se that caused the pattern – there was something else happening. So deglaciation might have been the ultimate driver of the change, but it was not the most important process. The next generation of ecologists wished to explicitly understand what processes resulted in that pattern. Was it just a matter of which species got there first, and what their life expectancies were? Or was something happening to the entire system? Were the plant and animal species, by their presence, influencing the soil, the light, perhaps even the temperature?

Ecology is fully recognized as a mature science now, but like many sciences, there have been active debates along the way. I watched many of these debates, and often, I admit, I got quite frustrated with some of my colleagues, who seemed unable to see the forest for the trees! (I just couldn’t resist, and it is such an apt description.) You see, some of the debates were about actual science, and those were always interesting and worthwhile. There was some snobbery, too, about which branches of the science were “more scientific” – making observations or doing experiments.

But the arguments that bothered me most were about “big science” (=large cooperative programs with many participants, working toward understanding complexity) versus “small science” (=single researchers working on a particular problem). And frankly, when you really look at it, this is a fear-based way of thinking. It basically says, “Oh us poor ecologists. We will never have very many research resources, so we should spread them out equally so that everyone gets a little.” That’s a bit of an exaggeration, but fundamentally, it’s focusing on a lack of abundance, rather than focusing on the most important scientific questions that we should be solving.

When I received my Ph.D., in 1987 (which seems quite recently to me!), scientific papers with more than one author were counted as less important than those with only a single author. So that was a combination of small science and snobbery together! If you look at my list of publications, you’ll see which camp I am in. To me, the greatest value to be had, for sure, is in working in teams, and although bigger is not necessarily better, for the problems we were/are trying to solve, it seemed like we almost never have enough people or resources.

The very first organizing meeting for NEON was held in early 2000. From the workshop report: “The purpose of NEON is to provide a broad integrated network of ecological research and monitoring sites that would constitute a distributed facility for researchers in environmental biology spanning all levels of biological organization from molecular genetics to whole-ecosystems at landscape and continental scales.”

So at that time, the focus was on providing a basis for science – a distributed facility. Consequent to what was happening with NEON nationally, smaller groups of scientists began to rally around the concept and discuss what could be done if such a network were actually funded. I convened a small group of scientists at the Ecological Society of America annual meeting in Snowbird, Utah that August, where we set out our initial ideas of how we could work together as a network in Alaska, as part of NEON. As the concept developed, I later convened a NEON workshop in Fairbanks, in August 2002, bringing in scientists from around the country who had interest in Alaska, as well as land managers from around the state who needed the scientists and the research to do their jobs well. NSF program managers had told us that funding for NEON was coming soon, and we wanted to be ready to present them with our best cooperative efforts.

But it was not to be that easy. As the first NEON workshop reported, “Other disciplines such as physics and astronomy have advanced greatly with the provision of major infrastructural investments.” True. And it took years of work to get that in place. So it was with NEON.

Not too long after the Fairbanks meeting, I made the choice to take a leave from science and try my hand at business. Although the decision was driven by many things, mostly personal, I admit that I always wondered if NEON would ever happen. The potential for NEON was the thing that, at that time, most excited me about being in science. I settled into running a business in Boulder, and soon scarcely had time to do more than keep a distant eye on science.

But I didn’t totally stop watching. I knew that Dr. Dave Schimel had received some significant funding for NEON back in the mid-2000s and had, indeed, been quietly working away here in Boulder to secure the longer-term funding. I knew that they had formed a non-profit corporation, NEON, Inc., and that Dave was the CEO. The non-profit was a brilliant move, because it avoided battles over which university or agency would house such a critical facility, and would also allow for independent control of (and hopefully would minimize) overhead costs, which can eat up large amounts of research dollars. You end up with a political debate rather than a practical one.

But I heard little about the goings on at the fledgling NEON. There was a part of me that wanted to apply for a position there, but as I owned a significant local business that required my attention, I had to let that desire go. I did wonder, on occasion, what they had accomplished. I asked around, but no one in my close circle seemed to know anything other than that they existed.

So when I read that the big kahuna had finally been funded, that NEON is, after all, to become a reality, in a big, big way, that in fact the funding is already in place, my heart literally leaped. (Dave Schimel is the Principal Investigator for the recent award and is the Chief Science Officer for NEON. He’s also probably the smartest person I have ever met.) Dave described the NEON mission in a recent blog post, “The National Ecological Observatory is a bold effort to begin characterizing bioclimate, species distributions and ecosystem function early enough in this era of rapid change to form a rigorous basis for ecological forecasting in a time of complex and unprecedented change.” That challenge is enormous. NEON is the only way to approach it.

I haven’t even written about what NEON plans to do yet. I’m still giddy over its very existence and the possibilities that it will create through its datasets. And to quote my son Daniel, from his hysterically funny and touching high school graduation speech, “I want to keep this short (…ish).”

It took years and years of hard work and dedication on the part of many, who were willing to recognize that the end result would be worth it. The time they spent perfecting the plan was time they were not writing papers, teaching classes, meeting with students, serving on local committees, or any of the other dozens of tasks that university and government researchers must accomplish in order to be considered productive (and therefore to keep their positions). Jim McMahon, Dean of the College of Science at Utah State University, expressed it well in a remark published in the Utah Pulse: “This is truly a triumph for the hundreds, really the thousands of people who have given so much of themselves to make NEON a reality. We’re ready to bring the next generation of environmental observation to those working to understand, predict and respond to environmental change on a grand scale.”

Although my own role in NEON was small, and even though I have been on the sidelines for much of it, I am proud to have been part of this creation. Ecology is the study of relationships, and it took strong relationships, and lots and lots of talking, to make this important dream happen.

The NEON science plan, which is still accepting public comment, is available at their website http://www.neoninc.org. NEON, and the scientific community behind NEON, has turned out a plan that is not scientifically perfect, but rather that is robust, achievable, and will allow us to have comprehensive, completely accessible datasets on how our major ecosystems are responding to important drivers in environmental change. There is still a 5-year building phase before the system will be considered fully operational, and it is planned to exist for 30 years.

Keep your eye on this one. Ecology has just come into its own. And while you’re waiting, this is a cool video about NEON:

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Guest Posting: Daniel Walker’s Graduation Speech

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My wonderful son and friend Daniel Walker graduated from September High School this morning, and his speech had us all doubled over in laughter and awe of this talented young man. My mama heart was bursting with pride. We have had so many requests for a copy of the speech that I decided to share it here.

Hey guys,

I’m done. It’s a strange feeling, and I’m not sure how I feel about moving on from this school. I feel like a little baby bird that’s just learned how to fly and to find its own food. Once a bird can do these things, it must be kicked out of the nest and into the real world, one full of predators and power lines which can be deadly if flown into. Of course, in the birds’ case, it can never come back again or it will be attacked by its own parents. Luckily for us humans, our families don’t abandon us entirely for at least another year or two, sometimes even longer. Still, it’s a major transition to move out of the world of mandatory education, and into one of voluntary education and work.

I’ve noticed that parents seem to be much more excited about this transition than the students who are graduating. This is quite understandable, for high school graduation is a great turning point where parents finally get to seem some of their hard parenting work pay off (hopefully). For us children, meaning me, it’s a time of great uncertainty, relief, and introspection.

People often say to me, “What are your goals? What are your plans? What are you going to do? Where are you going to college? What does your career path look like for the next 30+ years? How are you going to support yourself in this depressed economy? Who are you going to marry and how many kids will you have, if you have kids? Will you have kids? Have you thought about going into law? Because I think you’d be a good lawyer, and lawyers make good money and my uncle’s a lawyer and he likes it, and you probably would too. Are you going to stay in Boulder? Why don’t you go to CU, and stay around your friends and family? Well I don’t know if you’ve fully considered all your options and every facet of your life and what it could become. And what about everybody else’s lives and every facet of them?”

And I say, “Uh, I don’t know.”

“There’s a lot of good schools out there. Maybe I’ll go to art school. I like to draw and stuff. I don’t know though… Maybe I’ll study English and be an editor or something. I could even end up working at K-Mart my whole life, although I’d rather not. Anything’s possible, right?”

And they look at me with sad eyes that seem to say, “I hope there’s still time for you to land your crashing plane before you and everyone on it burns alive.”

Well, maybe it’s not quite like that. That was really more of a caricature of what people say, intended to convey my overwhelming sense of uncertainty about the future. It seems to me that we live in a very big and complicated world, one that’s changing very quickly. So really, I don’t know what I want to do with myself. All I know is that I want to help people somehow. And make art if I can.

The thing I love about art is that there are no limits to what one can or cannot do. If I were to dress a pine tree up in a bikini, I could call it art and nobody could rightfully argue with me. I could light a park bench on fire and call it art just as easily. This might not help very much with the police, but it would still be art. The cool thing about it is that people will look at something very thoughtfully and without bias if they are told that it’s art. If you found a random tree stump, and told someone that it was a work by a famous artist, they would most likely look at it from all angles, trying to glean any possible meaning from it. Finally, they would say, “I guess I just don’t get it.” Or, “Wow. That’s amazing. It really sends a powerful message.” And in my opinion, a tree stump is just as powerful and beautiful as any work by Picasso or DaVinci. I could tell you why, but I’d rather keep this speech short (…ish).

[At this point he turns to a new page and looks sheepish as the audience clearly sees that he's not quite halfway through - lots of laughter]

This leads me into the thank-yous. Joy, thank you for introducing me to ceramics, which is my favorite medium right now. Your gentle guidance, constant encouragement, and helpful suggestions have been indispensable in my growth as an artist, and as a person. You’re one of my favorite people to talk to.

Angela, I hardly knew you until last semester, but you are an incredible artist and teacher. Before taking your class, I had hardly painted anything in my life. Now I feel comfortable using paint after just a few months in your class. I’ve noticed that you have a unique ability to bring out the artistic talent in anyone, and I hope you continue to do what you love in life.

Rob, you’re old. Old as in you’ve been at September School for a long time. You are quite possibly the most effective teacher I’ve ever met. You are able to strike a balance between fun and hard work, and in your classes fun and work are often the same thing. People pay attention when they get to create a fire tornado or electrocute a pickle from time to time, because it’s way cooler if you actually understand why the pickle glows when it gets zapped. I also like the super soaker as a disciplinary measure. It gets the job done.

Cameron, being in any of your classes is like spending an hour in another world. Your unmatched enthusiasm for teaching is spellbinding every time. You have a gift for narrative and humor which allows you to keep a classroom of hyperactive and jittery students at full attention throughout an entire class period, even when you’re talking about the evolution of the toaster oven, or something like that.

Dan, thanks for helping me get through the horrors and trials of math curriculum unharmed.

John Dunn. The man, the legend. You are an exemplary specimen of the adult male human, perfect for display in a museum or zoo.

Leslie, I can tell that you enjoy helping people, and that you’re very good at it. You played a very crucial role in my development as a person, and I hope that you can do the same for many other people. I’m sure you will, so I don’t really even have to say anything.

And Celeste, I know it’s hard to be introduced to an entirely new environment and told that you’re in charge. I think you’ve stepped up to the position well, and I hope you can hang in there. It’s a tough, brutal job, but I think you have what it takes.

I’d also like to thank Erin for being awesome.

And then there’s Jeff.

[Here he pauses just for a moment, so you are ready for him to say something profound and deep about Jeff. Instead he launches into a new topic, which you can hardly hear him say because everyone is laughing so hard.]

I’d also like to thank my family, my friends, and my wonderful girlfriend for helping me get this far into the game of life. It’s not an easy game, and I can’t find any cheat codes anywhere.

As I go on into the cold, unloving real world, I want to make sure this place stays around as the sanctuary and life-skills training ground it always has been. It’s not just anywhere that high-schoolers get treated like human beings in a classroom setting, and I would like to see this trait preserved in the culture of the school for the foreseeable future. I’m not really worried, though. There are way too many wonderful people involved for such a valuable thing to be lost. I’ll be back to check in.

Daniel Walker graduated from September High School in Boulder, Colorado on June 4th, 2011. In addition to his diploma, he was awarded Most Improved Student by the faculty, ending his career with a 3.85 gpa. Like many writers and aspiring writers, he suffers from Creativity Abundance Disorder, making it difficult to choose a particular path at times. Some of Daniel’s early childhood school misadventures are featured in a chapter in the book High IQ Kids. For information on his plans, please refer back to paragraph 4.
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Yes. I. DID!

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A long time ago, in what seems like a galaxy far, far away, I wrote a Ph.D. Thesis. And yes, I was even awarded a Ph.D. for this effort.

And somehow, in the hustle and bustle of life, in having 3-5 various careers and jobs in the meanwhile, I’d kind of, well, forgotten just what it took to do that. It was before the Internet, and I just squeaked under the advent of personal computers. I started it on a typewriter and finished it on one of the very first Mac Plus computers. The tables in it involved a great deal of sorting back and forth. You’d think I could do this using Microsoft Excel, right? Although some of the first editions of Excel (and Lotus 1-2-3) existed, they didn’t have the horsepower to do what I needed.

So, I wrote my own programs to do the sorting, using a programming platform that was the norm of the day – FORTRAN. I took the outputs and pasted them together – and by pasted I mean I used tape and glue, not Control-V.

The thesis was based on 293 samples of vegetation and soils from across a broad area of the northern coast of Alaska.

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The soil samples each involved digging a hole, sometimes taking up to an hour just for the effort. Then I painstakingly described the soils in the hole, sometimes crawling inside for a better look, took a sample of each, returned it to a laboratory in Colorado, and then again spent some very long amount of time on each sample, first determining the relative amounts of sand, silt, clay, and gravel within, and then doing chemical tests to determine the presence of certain in the soils. Each hole (“soil pit”) consisted of 3-7 layers, and each was described and treated separately. So that was between 879 and 2051 soil samples. And from the results of those samples, I was able to surmise information about the ways in which the landscape may have developed.

The vegetation samples consisted of a list of all the species present and an estimate of their abundance. Some of them required a microscope and even chemical analysis to identify for certain, so a sample of each species was collected and returned for definitive identification. There were usually 30-60 species in each sample, so that was between 8790 and 17,580 plants to go through. Then see above about analyzing the data using a series of FORTRAN programs that I wrote.

Many of the sites could be reached by vehicle, from the road network that services the Prudhoe Bay and Kuparuk oil fields. Daytime highs in July were often in the 40′s or below, with a strong wind blowing. But not all the locations were easily reached on foot. In some cases I hitched a ride on a helicopter, which would drop me and my assistant off for the day and then pick us up. One region I hitchhiked to by float plane, thanks to a US Fish and Wildlife Service study nearby. And in another case we had a bush pilot drop us off by landing on the gravel of a river and returning 10 days later. We had no radio, no cell phone, no satellite phone. We had provisions and a shotgun. That was the “scary one”.

And the hardest location involved a very long hike across the boggy, tussock-coverd landscape of the Coastal Plain (every footstep is on a different level, and you never quite know whether it’s solid ground or not). Honestly I don’t remember how far it was, I believe the hike took only 2-3 hours, but returning there was that 100+ pound pack filled with my precious soils and plants.

Then I wrote the thesis, 281 pages of it (admittedly with a LOT of tables and figures) – Vegetation and Floristics of Pingos, Central Arctic Coastal Plain, Alaska.

I haven’t even told you about pingos yet, the magical landforms that caught my interest and were the basis of my study. But I still remember the evening that I first heard about them, at a dinner with friends at the Thorne Ecological Institute in Boulder, and how that very evening I decided that I would write a thesis on them.

Pingos in the Mackenzie River Delta, near Tuktoyaktuk

“We had paddled and floated most of the day, which at this latitude was 24 hours long, but the wind from the north had made our progress very slow. Our arms and backs ached from paddling and poling the heavily loaded canvas folboats, which frequently had to be pulled off shoals and gravel bars… During the afternoon as I surveyed the landscape to the north from the river bank, I noticed a dome-like structure on the horizon but couldn’t really believe there was anything that high out there… It was nearly 2 A.M. and the tundra was still brilliantly lit by the arctic sun when we rounded a bank of the meandering Toolik River, and picked out our camp site on the terrace bank six feet above the river. I jumped onto the bank and there not more than 600 yards away was a large conical mound that looked to me like one of the pyramids of Egypt. It rose at least 100 feet above the tundra and had a base of 1000 feet, which made it almost like a mountain on the flat, prairie-like landscape. It was a pingo.” (John Koranda, 1970, in Pacific Discovery)

I write this blog post today because finding my thesis online (it was published as a book through a German press) not only brought back memories, but it astounded me to remember the effort that it took to accomplish it. And that was only the writing! I am working on a novel and a blog site that I also hope will become the basis of a non-fiction book. Both feel rather monumental right now. At the same time I am Chief Operating Officer of HOMER Energy and trying to start another non-profit corporation that we can use to help end energy poverty in developing countries. Surprisingly, these tasks seem easier than the books.

But that was the very same me who hiked what certainly added to hundreds of miles, with grizzly bears and polar bears about, to collect between 879 and 2,051 samples of soil and between 8,790 and 17,580 plants, who rode in helicopters, bush planes with questionably sane pilots, and float planes, and who wrote the entire thing up using a computer that seemed a godsend at the time and would be considered a joke today.

I was able to do it because it turns out that my 25-year-old self simply decided that this was what I was supposed to do. So I immediately took action, got into graduate school, wrote a National Science Foundation grant to fund the study, and went about my business. This business involved hauling a trailer the 4,000 miles from Boulder to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska and back again that first summer.

Although I would be wrong to say that I never doubted myself, overall I got there because fundamentally I believed I could do it.

Now seeing that someone feels the work has enough value to scan the book and make it available online touches me deeply. I CAN write these books. I know that I CAN get this non-profit in place and run this corporation  and watch it soar.

I can because I did. I did because I believed I could do.

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He’s a real character – bringing them alive on the page

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“He’s a real character!” We know what that means – someone larger than life. Likable or not, these folks make us sit up and take notice.

Hmm… “Larger than life” – what an interesting expression! Is it actually possible to be alive and also larger than life itself? In a writing sense, it’s about building a lens that magnifies those interesting qualities and experiences of very real people, and focusing on them until they become, indeed, larger than life.

Friday was day 1 of the 2010 Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Conference. I attended 2 sessions – 1 on “Getting to Know Your Characters”, led by Beth Groundwater, and a second 3-hour long session entitled “Basics Boot Camp”, aimed squarely at us beginners, and led by a team of published authors – Kay Bergstrom, Carol Caverly, Christine Goff, Christine T. Jorgenson, and Cheryl McGonigle.The “Boot Camp” session also spent a considerable amount of time on characters.

And my first response is – Thank you, ladies! Besides taking about 10 pages of notes, I had two notable experiences during these workshops. One was that 2 of my characters began to deepen. Just from listening and writing notes, they began to move off the page and into “reality”. I began to have my characters control what happens, not me. The second was a realization about writers that I think extends to many of the arts. We want to share our craft! How different from the overriding activity of business, which is to compete with one another. Yes, these authors do compete in some way, there is only so much attention in the world, but they mostly cheer each other on. (I have seen that here with the wonderful comments to my post about “How hard can it be?“)

But back to character and plot development… It is both thrilling and overwhelming to come into a new art as complex as novel writing in the middle of my life. I am surrounded by published authors, editors, agents. I have heard stories of decades-long struggles (please, no…). I have laughed and cried. I have taken about 20 pages of notes so far. I have decided to return my library copy of The Writer’s Journey and buy one of my own, so that I can mark it up.

And I have made it a personal vow that my characters will be interesting, will make you want to read more, but of course I won’t spend the first 3 pages of the book describing them!

Here was my favorite trick from day 1. It helped me get beyond some of the overwhelm I was experiencing in character development. Take one person you know well and admire greatly, and write down two qualities or characteristics you admire in them. Now take one person you loathe, and write down two characteristics that create this loathing. Now combine those into one character. You have a character with qualities that are balanced between admiration and loathing. Now add one more good quality. That is one possible character. Start with the 4 and add one more bad quality – you have a new character. These characters are interesting because they are complex. And now it is up to me, the writer, to probe a bit and figure out why they have these characteristics.

I came up with a character who played the fiddle, was brilliant, had embezzled money from family members, and was a narcissist. Then I made him funny. That was my sympathetic character. I would have very mixed feelings about him. I might enjoy his company some, but I’d have to stay on my guard. Then instead of funny, I made him a philanderer. OK, yuck, I really do not like this person. Brilliance and musical talent suddenly become characteristics that mean very little, even though I started with those, from someone I really do admire and care about.

Ruth Thorsen Wheatley is one of Trading Future’s main characters. She is 70 years old when my story begins. She is very risk averse. Her father was kidnapped when she was 30, and he was never found. Her husband died a few years later, leaving her with 2 children. Ruth wants, more than anything, to find out what happens to her father. He is frozen in her mind at 53 years old. She has almost stopped feeling. She knows now that he must be dead, for he would be 103 were he still alive.

I am enjoying getting to know Ruth. I didn’t tell you much about her at all. As a matter of fact, I left out a lot of important parts. Because I am also learning the importance of leaving my clues slowly… And perhaps even hiding them.

So here is a little challenge to you. Tell me at least 3 things about Ruth that I didn’t tell you, and that would define her in a major way. Who knows – I might even incorporate some of your ideas into Trading Futures. ;-)

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