My Anus

“Did you have a good time in Mianus (my anus)? how did you like my anus?” with a name like mianus river state park, it’s funny to discuss with J and B. “my anus was ok..” they admitted.

My wife K, who tries not to pollute our kids’ minds too much with vulgar language asked, “do you think Mianus might be pronounced ‘me anus’?” “No. how do you pronounce Miami? My ammy right? So mianus is pronounced my anus…” I reply.

It was hard to get into my anus, since it’s so popular…. Indeed when we arrived the cars overfilled the trailhead lot and spilled into side streets where a douchebag cop was writing tickets to people who parked illegally. For Christ’s sake, people just need to get out of quarantine and get fresh air, don’t write a ticket and spoil their day. I asked him, “where can a poor city family like us get free parking?” He said “at the corner of westover and canfield drive. Make a left and a left about a quarter mile away.”

Great, we had to walk a little to get to my anus. We didn’t know what to expect when we went to my anus… who knew Stamford would have trails like this? the trails formed a web on the rolling hill landscape connecting rivers to bogs to pools. At the bogs, you could hear the bullfrogs make their calls. When we walked into private property along the east side of the dark shimmering river, we crossed the water on a serendipitous fallen tree to get back to the main hiking loop. The poplar trees met the ground like eagle claws. it was rather dark and comfortably cool in my anus as the tree canopy provided good coverage from the sun… People peacefully fished for salmon and trout in the shade. I threw pebbles into the water trying to bend reality. against the leafy green canopy, we saw Scarlet Tanagers. With their blood red bodies with jet black wings and tails, they are the summer princes of the eastern forests. They're also one of the most frustratingly hard to find birds as they stay high in the forest canopy singing their songs. https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Scarlet_Tanager/sounds

Speaking of songs, My Anus River State Park was actually the 94 acre estate of singer Libby holman (1904-1971) before it was transformed into a state park in 1990. She sung torch songs like 1929 hit “Moanin’ Low” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsq9aIc07gs A torch song is a sentimental love song, typically one in which the singer laments an unrequited or lost love, either where one party is oblivious to the existence of the other, where one party has moved on, or where a romantic affair has affected the relationship. The term comes from the saying, "to carry a torch for someone," or to keep aflame the light of an unrequited love. My torch songs pale in comparison to libby’s torch songs.

Looking into her love life, you see a web of tragedy and drama as convoluted as the trails on her estate. She was best known pioneering the use of the strapless dress and for her intimate relations with men and women including Dupont heiress louisa d’andelot, Reynolds tobacco scion Zach Smith Reynolds, and sculptor Louis Shanker. Her lover killed Reynolds in 1933 after she revealed she was pregnant. Her son from Reynolds died in climbing Mt whitney at the age of 17. In 1971 she committed suicide breathing in carbon monoxide in a rolls Royce. She was depressed schanker forbade visits from her lesbian lovers… and also her friend martin luther king was shot dead. it was libby that provided MLK the funds to visit India to meet followers of Mahatma Gandhi, whom he referred to as "the guiding light of our technique of nonviolent social change.”

Upon leaving my anus in our brown subaru, we vowed to return to the enchanted forest. 

Scarlet Tanager

Poplar claw

Serendipitous tree crossing

                                   

Libby Holman

Bridges and Walls

On our ride up to our hike, 3 police cruisers rushed the left lane and blocked traffic. As we waited in frustration, we wondered whether it was an accident. 10 minutes later the entire southbound lane of the west side highway was overtaken by thousands of Black lives matter protesters. 5 days ago a Minneapolis cop, Derek Chauvin, clamped his knee down on handcuffed George Floyd’s neck snuffing out his life while Floyd pleaded his last words, “I can’t breathe... you’re killing me...and mama.” Marchers crossed over the median to the northbound lane and streamed around our line of stalled cars.

Outrage over police brutality has spawned race riots across the country. Notions of social distancing for corona were thrown out the window. Ironically for ‘black lives matter’ protests, within a month we will see the next wave of corona virus deaths hit America spawned by these mass protest gatherings. These protestors were so mad, they were willing to risk spreading viral deaths and infections to vent their rage. Many more black lives will be lost.

Once the traffic cleared we headed to Stamford. Our latest hiking obsession. A suburb I had known only through passing views of garish office buildings whenever I rode commuter trains en route to new haven. Drive 15 minutes north of downtown, there are 3 preserves that were once farmland in 1890s now designated for hiking and recreation. Mianus (pronounced “my anus”), zofnass family preserve, and ward pound ridge reservation.

Yesterday we visited ward pound ridge reservation. upon arrival, the sounds of honking and racial protestors were supplanted by oblivious bullfrogs and crickets. We’ve gotten into a sort of corona hiking routine. Arrive late in the late afternoon, get lost on winding trails, drive frantically to Tabouli grill for chicken shwarma sandwiches a few minutes before they close, and return to nyc. Our exploration of the trails has been matched by the exploration of Tabouli’s menu. At first it was stream walks, then it was beech and poplar forest hikes, and yesterday it culminated in pond wading and J, getting completely wet. The first time we ordered food it was standard schwarma and falafel, then we explored tabouli and Israeli salads, and yesterday mujadarra instead of pilaf and Moroccan salad and a series of smoothies.

All the hikes we’ve done in Stamford share one curious characteristic - meandering waist high stone walls. Miles and miles of serpentine walls slither through the landscape. back in 1890’s they marked extents of property. One can imagine the cows and sheep bound by these walls. Then the farms were abandoned, probably because farmers could not compete with the agricultural efficiencies in the flat plains of the Midwest. Today, towering tulip poplars, beech and maple conspire to coverup the history of place. 24,000 years ago, the Wisconsin Ice Sheet glacier covered half of north America. Like a slow moving river, the glacier which was 1000 feet deep at one point, picked up till – an array of sediments, rocks, sand and clay, as it advanced. At their farthest point of expansion glaciers left the most till. 16,000 years ago, the glacier retreated leaving the protective moraine of long island, and sheltered harbors of Connecticut coast line and rocks that are so abundant that farmers nicknamed them “New England Potatoes.” The farmers used these rocks to construct the walls we see today. Current day hikes cut through the walls providing a slice through time – modern day recreation hiking trails reveal the bygone farm borders and agricultural endeavors from 200 years ago, and retreating glacier action from 16,000 years ago.

                                        

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Orcas island

Given 1 year to live, 48 year old shipbuilder and former mayor,  Robert Moran left Seattle to orcas island in 1905. Today, his mansion (and grounds developed by Olmstead, the designer of Central Park) has been turned into a resort. The Olmsted paths exhibited the same freeness and branching as Central Park, except at the border between resort and wilderness, the paths just bled into the landscape. Moran eventually lived till 83 years old. The indigenous Lummi Indians on which land  his mansion was built on, credited the Indian healing properties of the site as the reason for moran’s healing and longevity. After a couple weeks of intense work, I felt rejuvenated there too. 

The hiking in moran state park was very quiet. We hardly saw other people on the trails, we walked through redwoods, moss, and cool damp air through the hilly mountains and lakes by the sea. 

Kayaking gave us another perspective of the island.The waters are relatively calm because of all the islands in the bay. The islands sit in the rain shadow of Olympic national forest to the southwest, so the weather is sunnier than the typical Seattle overcast skies. At the northern point  of orcas island is a ferrry to sucia island.. a horseshoe shaped spit of land the result of a geological subduction event that pushed ocean floor sedimentary rocks to form the island. With the waves rolling  strong, making turns at the unprotected extremities of the islands was a little rough. 2 times we unexpectedly had to portage through narrow necks of land to continue the adventure in another bay. The first portage occurred near the arrival dock. A couple camp sites had Jimi Hendrix music blasting. Jimi hailed from Seattle. I noted to the kayak guide, that unlike nyc radio which never plays Metallica, nirvana or hendrix, i had heard them multiple times the past day on Seattle radio. There is something in this land that values that encourages this type of music apparently.  The second portage happened by a set of caves that Chinese smugglers used in the late 1800s to hide illegal Chinese immigrants from the authorities. The sedimentary rock eroded to form niches for hiding people at one point.

The water in the Pacific Ocean is green, whereas the water in the Atlantic around Boston and New York is blue. Peculiar orange trunked madrona trees sprung out of the soil as bald eagles flew overhead, and seals popped their curious heads out of the water. I learned that the geese Americans call ‘Canadian geese’ are called ‘American geese’ by he Canadians. Apparently both cultures label the messy annoying ‘defecate everywhere’ geese  on the other bordering nation. The water is unusually deep due to glacial advances. Apparently orcas (killer whales) live year round in the waters. Some types of  orcas feed on seals, others  feed on salmon.

Kayak!

I stepped into the muck with crocs, my foot instantly started sinking. The more I attempted to wriggle free, the deeper I sunk. As a former scientist prone to rather deep thoughts, I made a mental note to self, “the mud is rather cold and slimy and I’ve totally underestimated the suction forces of crocs in muck.” I slipped my foot out and dug out my crocs with my bare hands and proceeded to walk barefoot. The unusually high arch of my foot formed an air pocket that didn’t cave in like the ethylene-vinyl acetate foam material of crocs. I was born with mud walking adaptations and proceeded to trudge further into the bay to launch the kayak into the shallow water.

Ever the optimist, I tried to convince myself the glass was half full. Maybe the stinky muck on my legs and feet would serve as a natural sunscreen for my legs (it didn’t), or better yet, an emollient for the spider bite I received on my hand while trying to clear cobwebs out of the kayak (it wasn’t).

I scanned my situation. The sun was shimmering bright across Pleasant Bay. To the east, the dunes of Nauset beach. In the middle of the estuary, the forests of Pochet Island. By the launch and the rest of the western land, the backyards of rich people’s vacation homes overlooking the cove. Present day Pleasant Bay, Cape Cod was called ‘Monomoyick’ by the Indians. Monomoyick sounds kind of the way it feels… Monomoyucky, but it actually means great bay.

It is at these points in life I’m reminded of why I would’ve been a terrible scientist had I perservered with it. Darwin once reported finding the seeds of seventeen species of plants caught in the mud on a duck’s webbed foot. He hypothesized, the first marsh grass seeds probably arrived at the Galapagos from a migrating shorebird’s muddy foot. Darwin’s power of observation and making ecological connections was incredible.

My powers of observation are not as profound and often misguided by my intrinsic desire to live as cheap as possible and then further clouded by my lack of foresight which leads me to mucky situations. As I balanced myself and seated myself in the kayak, I was trying to recall how I literally got stuck in this situation.

With the best of intentions, we rented the summer cottage because it included 2 kayaks and 4 bikes as part of the deal. I rationalized to myself, since the cost of kayak and bike rentals in Cape Cod is worth hundreds daily, just the daily use of these conveyances would justify the cost of the vacation rental. In my calculations, however, I didn’t realize the logistical complications of launching kayaks.

Since our rental house was set a mile inland from the nearest shore and the roads were gravel, there was no easy way to portage the kayaks to water. During summer season, parking is limited to residents only at town launches. We would have to load 2 kayaks onto the car, drive them to a launch, haul them to the water, lock them up somehow, return to the house, park, return to the launch site by bike, lock the bike to a tree, kayak, return, dock, lock the kayak to a tree, bike home, retrieve the car then come back to fit them over the car and then drive home. Capisce?

We didn’t kayak for several days of the vacation because I was trying to figure out how exactly to choreograph the kayak launch sequence: load kayaks onto car-drive-park-drop off kayak-drive home-bike-lock bike to trees-kayak-lock kayak to trees-bike home-drive back-load kayak-drive home-unload kayaks off car.

With only a couple days left in the rental, I started lamenting the kayaks would go unused. Cruising in the car all around the area, I scoped different launch points, trying to figure out how to lock kayaks and bikes to available trees. There were nice sites to launch kayaks with fancy floating wooden docks, but they all had signs posting the requirement of resident permit parking stickers to park by the launches.

Then serendipitously, we stumbled on an obscure launch at the end of Barley Neck Road in the north side of town, near the northern tip of Pleasant Bay. This launch site was hidden and remote with ample free public parking. We were ecstatic. We praised the good lord and went home and immediately started looking up Youtube videos on how to strap 2 kayaks to the hood of a station wagon. After much early morning jostling, we figured out how to just prop them up 2 kayaks and tie them up with ratchet straps slightly hanging over the sides of the car, and then prayed they wouldn’t fall off.

K. who has a healthy fear of drowning, donned a lifejacket and forced me to wear one as well as we set off into the bay. Unbeknownst to us, we would later form quite an absurd sight since the water was literally 12” deep at deepest point within the bay. At the start of our disembarkation, we spotted a blue heron standing in the middle of the Bay. We assumed it was standing on some aberrant shallow sand bar, and didn’t anticipate the rest of the water would be of similar depth. The whole bay was in fact a shallow swamp. Global warming resulted in the water from the ocean breaching the protective sand dunes at Nauset Beach and had pushed a tremendous layer of sediment into the bay. We could have walked across the bay barefoot. But with all the time invested in launching the kayaks we paddled out till we got stuck in muck and started foundering.

You learn most through mistakes. In this case, we learned a lot. By neglecting to check the tidal charts before launching we learned there’s little water in the bay to warrant the use of life jackets. In bright yellow life jackets, alternating between paddling, standing in the middle of Pleasant Bay, and standing up to dig our kayaks out of the mud, it took us a lot longer to navigate through muck. Consequently, we learned it’s not such a great idea to drink a gallon of water for a trip that will take hours longer than anticipated since it looks quite ridiculous when you start peeing by the side of your kayak boat, in the middle of the bay for all to see. We learned to read the subtle changes in water ripple patterns on the bay that signaled hazardous sandbars ahead. And so on and so forth.

There, with the water ankle deep, you could see the roots of the bay grasses exposed with thousands of mussels clinging to their roots. Were you feeling like Italian gourmet meal, you could literally harvest linguine and mussels in a swamp to table feast. The mud made things very unappetizing however. The thought of all the septic tanks of Cape Cod discharging into the bay and deviant pissing kayakers, made me question whether the mussels would be edible anyway. I was not tempted to harvest the mussel in red tide sauce.

Every once in a while, the herons who had forgotten you were present, took flight like prehistoric pterodactyls and landed at their favorite fishing spots. There they stood in the muck. Serene with long stalk legs, and bony 3 pronged feet, they exerted very little pressure on the muck and seemed to stand gracefully on top of the water, perfectly adapted to their surroundings. Flicking their wings back and forth, extending and retracting them, and raising and lowering the wings, they stirred their prey into activity. With large eyes once they spotted their prey, they would spear the fishes with their long sharp beaks.

We, on the other hand, drifted and foundered aimlessly around the bay, chasing herons around the shallow bay. Without a dock I now knew why they didn’t restrict parking on Barley Neck launch. The town figured those tourists cheap and dumb enough to use the landing deserved pity. Even the blue heron, with its oversized eyes, would glance at us from a distance and feel pity for us. To them, we were the cheapskates of the human race. The strange breed of shameless opportunists who found the cheapest ways to live use bikes and kayaks for free. The clueless tourists who wore unnecessary life jackets and launched kayaks at the wrong time and places with completely inappropriate footwear.

Despite our misadventures, I couldn’t help but feel part of this strange ecosystem. Cape Cod was our open air classroom. During spring semester, we had walked and hopped the moss lined streams behind the Wellfleet backyards that fed into the bay. At that time, we wondered why the fish like herring swim upstream from the ocean to the ponds to spawn risking their lives in low oxygen fresh water ponds. In fall, we came back to find the answer lay in evolution and geological history in the Pleasant Bay.

40,000 years ago, the mile thick Laurentian glacier scraped over mountains and carved out valleys in New England melting in Cape Cod where it met warm ancient coastal gulf streams, leaving in its wake a moraine of sand beaches, ponds, rivers, and bays suntanned people now enjoy.

Fresh water fish in upland ponds were swept down river in melting glaciers to the ocean in annual spring floods. Those fish that were able to survive gradual change in salinity were rewarded by rich estuarine waters with boundless supplies of plankton and small fish. Their eggs couldn’t survive salt water. Gradually fish evolved that could migrate back to fresh water to spawn. Their offspring could lay more eggs in the protected pond, and when ready and strong enough, descend the herring runs and exploit the abundance of the ocean. Animal behaviorists call this a ‘stable evolutionary strategy’ - the fish adapted to exploit the protection of the pond and the abundance of the ocean. The heron would come to the pond and stalk the herring. The cheapskate tourists would come to follow the herons around the bay… What we see today is a reflection of the past.

And every time I come back here I feel humbled like this: “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring, will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” TS Eliot from the Four Quartets.

In the Attics of the American Natural History Museum

“In the 1860s, the city of New York set up two museums: the metropolitan Art museum and the American museum of natural history. While the Met spent most of its money on the museum building, the founders of AMNH decided to spend money on specimens and buying other’s collections. That’s why AMNH looks so decrepit now.”

Gina was our tour guide. A recent Columbia phd grad student in vertebrate paleontology. She gave us an exceptionally thorough and extensive tour. I had worked in the molecular systematics department obtaining and analyzing DNA sequences of insects to study evolution and met her in the lab. She told me to bring some friends for a tour on a Saturday, and so I took her up on her offer. We started in her office. Along the way we passed the world’s premier synapsid collection. synapsids are the life forms believed to be the ancestral link between reptiles and mammals. They lined the dusty shelves. Her office used to be the haunt of Frick. Frick was a robber baron from the turn of the century who took up vertebrate paleontology as a hobby. In his circular turret in the museum, the Tyrannosaurus rex was once displayed. That’s why there is a pulley along the staircase in the hallway outside his old room. Apparently, Frick had a falling out with the president of the museum, and moved his collections to Long Island. When he died, however, he bequeathed a generous endowment and his collection to the department.

Gina showed us her field of study, hedgehogs. Hedgehogs are interesting because they have existed for 80 million years, (predating the dinosaurs), and still exist today, it is thought mammals evolved from reptiles. Evidence of that connection is seen in the few animals that still lay eggs like the platypus and exhibits. During the age of dinosaurs, the mammals were small… after dinosaur’s extinction, mammals radiated around the world and underwent large changes in complexity and structure. How did placental development evolve? Why did mammals all of a sudden increase in size? are questions that are being settled today.

To try to answer these questions, she has been tracing the development of hedgehogs by looking st their fossil structures, using cat scans, morphological data from fossils, etc… as we left her office, she took out her pet monitor (lizard). It had been found on a Long Island driveway… a long journey for the african reptile related to the Komodo dragon. “It’s easy to maintain because it bathes in the water dish in the cage. The only problem is that when It bites into you, the only way to dislodge it is to put your hand and the monitor underwater till he lets go of the air.”

She led us into the vertebrate paleontology building. AMNH is comprised of 17 different buildings/departments connected by the longest hallway in North America outside the pentagon. The vertebrate paleontology elevator has its own elevator. The elevator requires special keys to operate, thus restricting the movement between floors. Inside the elevator, beside the buttons are tags of the contents of each floor (8 dinosaur fossils, 7 labs, 6 mammoths, 5 rhinos and bovids 4 horses, 3 fossil fish and so on)

Our first stop was the lab. In the lab were many microscopes, metal works facilities for molds, specimens being worked on. In one corner, a fossil preparatory, Marilyn, was busy working on a baby pterosaur uncovered in a lake in South America. She worked painstakingly, removing a grain of sand at a time, Jeff asked “how can you remove a grain at a time” she replied, “it’s like moving mountains when uncovering the fossil. Ken and Ben posed with the brush by the microscope. Marilyn’s heart jumped as she saw us jokers clowning with her pterosaur which she had already spent 100 hours working on. Then she let out a nervous relieved smile. Gina asked if we knew what pterosaurs were…. “pterosaurs are like pterodactyls right?” said Jeff. Then Marilyn confirmed, “yes they are the group that included pterodactyls. Their fourth finger is extended, while their wrist and other fingers remain halfway in like an elbow. An adult wing could easily span 6 feet for a pterosaur.”

We left her cubby and walked around. On Amy’s desk were fossils from Mongolia. Dinosaur bones there are very well preserved because dinosaurs were felled in violent sandstorms. The sand buried them so fast that oxygen never had a chance to work on decaying their matter. In some cases, the skin was still preserved. She showed us a cast being worked on… a dinosaur’s feet and eggs were in the cat, thus showing the dinosaur in the act of egg laying.

To make a cast, one pours plaster on the site of the bones. Then, the area (many cubic feet of sediment) under the pollster is lifted to an estimated depth, and a plaster coat is applied to all sides of the sediment. To cast is to enclose the area in an egg of plaster. When the cast is brought back to the museum, the plaster is removed, and the sediment is removed grain by grain…

In some cases, the bones (ie of fossil fish) are protected with an epoxy and are put into an acid bath. The acid will eat away at the sediment, and leave only the bones which are protected. It’s like an etching of a fossil fish.

How do people find fossils and why are some areas better than others?” I asked.

“there are fossils everywhere.even in Manhattan! The badlands in south Dakota is exceptionally rich in fossils because there is no damage to the fossils from burrowing tree roots.. (there are no trees). To find a fossil, one first quarries for rocks, then cracks them open. The rock fractures at their weakest point -- the plane of the fossil."

We marveled at the collections of fossils. Gina told us the unglamorous sided of fossil preparation. "You're out there... the sun is blazing, there is not a tree in sight. you dig up buckets of sand, and filter them through mesh. then you painstakingly look for teeth, cause often times, that is all that is preserved. The nearest beer is 200 miles away. The director, Mark Norel, or the Vertebrate paleontology department here spent one year in grad school filtering 20 tons of dirt in futility."

On the elephant floor, she told us of Dumbo.. er Jumbo story. "Jumbo was the world's largest elephant taken into the Barnum and Bailey circus by PT Barnum. Jumbo became very temperamental towards the end of his life, and was wildly unpredictable. Anyways, somehow Jumbo escaped and was hit by a train. A curator dug up his bones later and brought them to the museum. Elephants only have 4 giant teeth and they are replaced twice in their lifetime. It turns out, Jumbo had a huge impacted molar in the back of his mouth. No wonder he was grumpy"

"Why do elephants have such long trunks?"

"An elephant skull with its tusk weighs 900 pounds. to lower the head to drink water is an enormous burden on the elephant... but with a trunk, it can drink with east. Ever seen a giraffe at a watering hole? it splays it legs then dips its head. It really opens up itself to predators..."

The finale of the Vertebrate Paleontology tour was the dinosaur storage rooms. Shelves and shelves of skulls, and vertebrae. "The barosaurus in the Rotunda is a plastic mold. It was created a little under a decade ago. A Wesleyan physics professor, and amateur paleontologist, spent much time going around the shelves and drawing and piecing together the barosaurus. Each bone is so heavy and unwieldy a crane is necessary to move them, and the only way to manipulate the arrangement of bones is detailed drawings. When they lined up all the vertebrae, it spanned the whole 100 foot long storage room! The plastic model was made in Canada, as all the bones were shipped in a truck there... I know all the details cause that was my first job here in the museum. When the barosaurus first arrived, the model was so heavy that the pelvis and vertebrae kept swiveling!" While we were walking around, Gina brought down Jeff's childhood world and dispelled the brontasaurus myth.

"You mean the brontosaurus never existed?"

"Yes, apparently on one dig, the found a barosaurus skeleton without a head. the paleontologists just mistakenly assumed that it was a different species from the barosaurus and named it brontosaurus."

After the tour we decided to explore the attics over the mammalogy department. As we passed an office, a scientist accosted us, asked for an ID and threw a suspicious glance. We proceeded up the stairs in the the darkness. The roofs of the attic are slanted 45 degree and are wood. A creaky metal catwalk cut across the ancient rooms. At one point, rows of stuffed animal heads (ram, deer, etc...) lined the walk and their glassy marble eyes were all pointed to the sky. a creepy walk indeed. One room along the way had a wire prison-like fence on both sides and had signs that read "Department of Mammalogy, Keep these doors locked at all times!" One door was curiously open, and I had my picture taken with elephant skulls. Their molars on their lower jaw were level with the ground, and the skulls themselves were also facing up towards the heavens. Elephant skulls have 2 openings for the nostrils of the trunk, unlike humans. Also unlike human's the bone supporting the nose is tremendous."

And then, past the Mayan stelae, were shelves of head busts of every race of man. Made in the 1930's, the museum anthropology department set out to document every race using real people as molds. Shelves and shelves of these heads. and at the end, past the boiler, 2 bushmen wrapped in old plastic. A perfect place for hide and seek. Two times, Ken hid and jumped out scaring the hell out of Jeff and Ben. But the biggest fright was doled to me by the hands of Jeff. On the way out, we noticed the prison doors had been closed. At the door at the top of the stair case, Jeff panicked and pulled at the door. "Who locked it?" he exclaimed. Everybody turned to me to see if I had the key. Ken went over to the door and tugged at it too. I went nervously back to the lit area of the attic. "What key? did the scientist lock us in from the outside?" It was saturday night, who would hear us? I rushed to the door, pulled it (it wouldn't open), pushed it in desperation. open. relief. "ha ha ha" "that was a good on, jeff, you fucker!" i said. but someone would get him back.

To cap the behind the scenes tour, we stopped by the entomology office/collections room and went up a narrow stairway to the roof, where one could see a panorama of central park sandwiched between harlem and midtown.... then to the rotunda ceiling, where the rosetta stones are moveable and one can peer at the unsuspecting barosaurus below.

Caroline met up with us, and showed us the hissing madagascar cockroaches. Ken fled the scene. He was disgusted by the tarantula cages lining the halls. In one office, Jeff was invited to touch a giant millipede (it looked like a black snake that was a foot long) "It feels like my fingernail" caroline invited. He touched the millipede, then her fingernail, then the millipede again. Jeff then asked Caroline if there were any dangers in touching the shedded tarantula skins on the shelf. Caroline replied 'no' then paused. (Tarantulas, known for their stinging bite, also a have a nasty defense weapon...their thin fiberglass-like hairs. They eject these at their predators, and can cause much respiratory damage). Jeff touched it, then Caroline leaked, "but some people are deathly allergic to tarantula hairs.. but they probably won't affect you." Jeff gulped. everybody laughed.

Iceland Travel Log

I've merged my blog writing about Iceland's geology, architecture, history, landscape, food, and planning with photos regarding my travels to Iceland last summer:

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