Friday, November 13, 2009

Driving Around Town

Last night as I was driving through an intersection in good old Albuquerque, when this beat up Subaru looking car was acting weird. I thought maybe he was just driving a standard that was making his car jerk, but slowed down so that he wasn't next to me. A few seconds later, he purposely swerved into my lane to hit the new blue pickup in front of me, then speed off. The blue truck threw on it's breaks, then speed off after the guy when he realized that he wasn't stopping. I almost hit the blue pickup, and the car behind me almost hit me. He could have hit me just as easily as the truck in front of me, and even though I have full coverage on my car, I don't want the hassle of fixing my baby. I turned around, the road rage looked like it was getting bad in front of me as the pickup was chasing him. It made me think of the road rage recently on the news with the National Guardsman killing someone else. I didn't want to drive behind a flipping pickup or anything like that.

This morning on the way to work, there was a homeless guy standing on the corner for handouts, and usually I don't pay much attention to them anymore. This one though was wearing his camouflage army fatigues, there was a dog wrapped up in a blanket next to him sleeping, and a huge green army bag beside them. I don't think a homeless guy would go to the trouble of finding a uniform and a army bag. I don't know where he's been, what war he has fought, or why he is on the street, but it was heartbreaking to see a military man on the street. Does our government not help out those who defend our country? Or is this man faking it and playing on our sympathies? My dad got a free meal at Applebees this Veteran's day, and gets all the free health care he can handle. He marched in the Veteran's Day parade with the kids he teaches in his military school. He was a Marine, and officer in Vietnam. He was the guy who watched the radar screen and told planes when they could land, and has never spoken one word about his time there, I've only heard stories from Mom. He does have a blue suitcase though, full of stuff from Vietnam, including what looks like shrapnel.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Predator Eyes

I tried to sleep, but the howls of the Mexican wolves kept me up. I forgot my ear plugs again, something I tried not to do when camping after toad surveys. I'm a light sleeper, which made me a great EMS dispatcher in college, I was up, perky and alert in a matter of seconds when the phones went off, not such a good thing when you camp every night though. I was working for the federal government near Julian, CA doing riparian surveys for several months in all the creeks in the eastern side of the county. My team would do bird surveys in the morning, assess the riparian vegetation during the day, and conducted endangered toad surveys at night, camping on site. Usually the frogs would drive me mad, hundreds of horny pacific tree frogs ribiting through half the night, and I had to put in ear plugs to get any sleep.

This night was particularly disturbing. Me and my partner would each take a different reach of the stream, doing the toad surveys alone. I had already spent all day in the same area, getting familiar with where the waterfalls were, and which spots would be tough to climb down in the dark. There was one spot that scared me in the day even though, several deer jumped out of the brush and ran up the steep canyon cliffs, giving me a quick fright until I realized what they were. When I walked through that same spot in the middle of the night, a fox jumped out at me. It looked almost as scared as I was, we caught each other off guard. Just as I was calming myself down, I felt someone or something staring at me. I looked around, my headlamp illuminating empty bushes and trees. The frogs were already silent ever since I came around the corner, their eyes visible in my light around the water. All I could hear was the splashing of moving water against my water proof boots below. Then I saw them, big eyes, big predator eyes that were facing forward instead of on the side like a deer. A large cat was staring at me. That is when I had my panic attack, there didn't seem to be enough air around me as we looked at each other, alone in the dark. I started walking further down the stream backwards, never taking my eyes off those eyes that seemed to follow me. When I made it around the corner, I figured that my toad survey was done, I was almost to the end anyway. I started climbing up the steep wall leading out, pulling myself up by grabbing onto bushes, the gravel slipping beneath my feet. When I made it to the top, I started crying and tried to called my partner on the radio, she had the truck. Radios are useless in canyons though, and so are cell phones.

I keep looking down the canyon wall toward the stream, which made me feel uneasy. I started walking back to our tents over a mile away, periodically giving the radio another try, and a glance over my shoulder to see if anything was following me. The night was silent, with a breeze that gave me chills even with my fleece, as I walked the winding dirt road. I did notice the stars, there always seem to be millions more out in the country, white specks splattered across the sky like a Jackson Pollock painting. As I got closer to our tent, that is when I heard for the first time, the call of Mexican wolves, adding to my fear of being vulnerably human and alone on this dark night on their land. Truck lights appeared from around the corner, it was my partner. She rolled down the window.

"Wow! How far did you walk? Our tents are just around the corner. Something scare you?"

"I got a little scared back there, a big cat was staring at me, I couldn't sit still and just wait for you." My voice trembled. "...and are those wolves I hear? In California?"

"That is scary, I don't know what I would have done. There must be a Mexican Wolf refuge up on that hill, I've heard that it is around here somewhere." She pointed above us. "It's alright, they are behind a fence, I'm sure."

Lying in my tent, I listened to the endangered Mexican wolf howls, and felt privileged to hear them, and I lucky to be alive. I wasn't sure exactly what I saw down in the stream, but it could have possibly taken my life if it wanted to.

(I will have to find some photos from here and post them later, I couldn't find any on the web.)

Friday, November 6, 2009

Sand Box


I took this picture while working in the sand dunes in 2004, if you look close you can see the next team of people on a dune in the distance.

I closed my eyes, even though I was wearing goggles, and could feel the warm wind and sand slapping me in my face at around 50 mph. The feelings of danger, excitement and freedom swelled inside of me, and I couldn't believe I was getting paid to do this!

It was a frosty day outside of Seattle when I got the news of my first botany job. I was in a bad mood, and couldn't drive my car because of the ice covering the roads and several inches of snow piled on top of it from weeks of being parked made my car not want to start. I put on my cowboy boots and bundled up, I was walking to the store to buy ingredients to make chocolate chip cookies. I bake when I'm sad or upset, and the memories of my grandmas, and the smells of cookies or bread makes me happy. My cowboy boots turned into ice skates, something that never happened in Texas. My butt hurt from all the falls, and I was indeed very grumpy as I slid home on the boots. I walked in the door of our wood stove warmed house, slush dripping off my boots, and threw the butter on the cabinet. My dad chuckled at my anger.

"You don't like the ice much huh?"
"Hell no!"
"Well how about a job starting next week in Southern California in some sand dunes?"
"They called! I got the job!"
"That's right, now are you going to make me some cookies?"

Finding endangered plants in the middle of hot sand dunes is no easy task, but I loved everyday of it. Clouds don't appear much in SoCal, the blue sky just gets streaked with some white stringy ones. So the sky above the sand dunes was almost always blue, contrasting the vast beige sand. These sand dunes are the biggest in the country, stretching as far as your eye can see when you are in them. I would leave my cockroach infested apartment around 2am, waving good bye to the drunk neighbors still leaning on the wall with beer in their hands to start my transects in the dunes right at the cool sunrise. The government hired professional drivers to take us out in sections of sand that might not have seen a person in years. It was a challenge getting so many of us out to the middle of nowhere by sunrise, and we only had one dune buggy. They ended up putting sand tires on two old Subarus to cart six of us at the same time.

The sand particles were bigger on the west side of the dunes, and fine as powder on the east side, because the wind carries smaller particles farther. This caused us to get stuck in the sand a lot, even with the professionals, on the east side. One such day, we got the dune buggy stuck in the fine sand. After hours of my team and boss (who was driving) digging around the tires, we gave up and waited for someone to pull us out. There were twelve other teams out in the dunes though, so the drivers were busy picking all of them up for hours and couldn't help us. Sand doesn't hold heat, so we were freezing after it got dark, still waiting to be rescued. We could see his jeep lights for miles as they came over several dune mountains along the way. He finally reached us, his naked lady flag flapping in the wind, and pulled us out in a couple of minutes with a tow strap. It was too late for me to drive back to the city, so I stayed in the tent city that the temporary botanists lived in out in the dunes. I was so tired, I didn't use one of the primitive showers to wash the sand off. It seemed to be everywhere, stuck in my hair and every crevice of my body. A friend let me have a sleeping bag, and I crashed even though they stayed up talking and watching movies on laptops. The next morning I woke up and noticed a huge pile of sand in her sleeping bag that fell off of me in the middle of the night.

Every day, for months, I walked those sand dunes. I figure that I've walked them from north to south at least twice. We had to stay in strait lines for the accuracy of science, sometimes being forced to walk deep down into the hot sand bowls and strait back out the steepest part counting the endangered plants along the way. The bowls would have kangaroo rats and sunflowers that smelled like vanilla, but in the afternoon they felt like a furnace when we were already in the hot desert. The best moments were waiting to be picked up at the end of our transects, after a hard days work. The three of us would lounge around on the sand in the shade, and I would close my eyes and feel the breeze against my face.

Lady Long Legs

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Soul Searching

I've been doing a lot of soul searching these last couple weeks, and throughout the last few months even though I didn't know I was doing it. It's amazing how one person who you meet on a chance encounter can have such an affect on your life. Was it a chance encounter though? I have been drawn to the exact place that I met him for years. I would drive past it on the highway and feel like I had to exit, increasingly over the last few years, and the few months before I met him there, the pull was overwhelming. I think back to other turning points in my life, how I had that same uncontrollable urge to do or go somewhere.

I had to go to Germany, I didn't understand it. I don't even understand how I ended up taking German rather than Spanish in college. The Spanish classes were full, so while still ordering my classes on the phone, I flipped through the catalogue and decided to take German instead. I met someone there who has had a huge impact on my life over the last ten years. We met with only a five minute window, and if either of us had been a few minutes slower or faster, we never would have met at all. I remember racing to the the U-bahn station to make the last one that went all the way to my house, having missed it before, and not wanting to walk through the asparagus farms in the dark again. We were the only two people in the station. I took my first job in SoCal working with wildlife because of him, his sister lived there. I owe all my work experience to him. I wouldn't be in this seat today without him, and wonder were I would have been if I was five minutes later to that German U-bahn station. Some other job, some other place for sure. I wonder if my brother, who died ten years ago, has had any affect from the underworld on these life changing decisions. Can loved family members do that? Or does their bond to you die when they no longer have any evolution connection to you? Or is there some path of destiny that we all follow, not understanding why?

I never understood the drive that sent me to college either, I just knew I would do it.

Monday, November 2, 2009

Wide Open Spaces


I miss being able to throw all my small treasures in the backseat of my car, and driving to a place I've never seen before for a job. That is the life of a seasonal biologist. Then the boss starts wanting you to stick around and tempts you with health insurance to trap you in the job, hoping you will have a kid and never leave. I'm dreaming of wide open spaces and a slow pace of life that doesn't require me flying across the country and living in hotels to do my daily job. Pine trees, and fields of flowers, grass and snow may lie in my future if I have the courage to dream. I want to be free, where the cowboys are friendly, and the landscape is wide open.