Where Are My Teeth?

Three Hour Tour

Years ago in Germany my father used to walk out into the countryside until he got tired and then stop at the nearest pub for a phone call and a refreshing glass of beer while he waited for my mother to drive over and pick him up. Towns and villages in vermont aren't nearly so conveniently laid out, so I've gotten used to the notion that when I walk out I'm also going to have to walk back.

Sometimes that doesn't work out quite as simply as it might. There's always something new to see around the next bend in the trail, and just for good measure the last half-mile of any trek is pretty much bound to be uphill. (If I wanted to come home by way of the tower in the park I could get a good quarter mile of downhill, but somehow I don't think it would help.)

So for yesterday's walk, after a fine day's outing to King Arthur, I wanted to explore the section of trail that leads out of the North Branch nature center into East Montpelier. Those of you even slightly familiar with the local geography might have spotted the first problem with this plan, namely that the nature center is about a mile from our house as the crow flies, and crows don't have to worry about walking up hill, down dale, or around ravines and thickets.

What with the pleasant topographical excursions and plenty of mushrooms, tree trunks, Vistas, flowersand angry birds to take pictures of it was the better part of an hour getting to the nature center, which of course is at the diagonally opposite end of a field from the footbridge that leads to the trail that leads to the trail that leads to the trail through East Montpelier. The dragonflies were buzzzing energetically through the swamp on the other side of the river, but they would not stop to pose.

At the intersection of the uphill trail with the one that leads back toward town I was set upon by a couple of dogs (or at least so their owner seemed to think as he apologetically leashed them) a retriever of unvertain heritage and a young bulldog who nuzzled my hand enthusiastically and then started trying to jump on my outstretch arm in a desperate attempt to see as high as my waist. From there I was pretty much on my own.

I won't say it's boring, but the East Montpelier trail follows the shoulder of the hillside, with no view to speak of, as it angles uphil and north. Those two things -- the hope of a payoff and the knowledge that at least the early part of the walk back would be downhill -- kept me going. The bridges over a couple of ravines are much more sturdily built than any of their Montpelier counterparts, and the trail is mostly wide and dry.

As usual in the forest, you can see a big clearing coming from quite a ways off by the quality of the light and the appearance of plants that couldn't gow in a completely cover understory. But I was still a little surprised to see this. About as bucolic a view as you could ask for, and the trail started heading back down as it paralleled the edge of the field. Oh, and it was about 6:30, and I'd started out about quarter to 5. (If you follow this link you'll see Sparrow Farm somewhere around the E in East Montpelier.)

So back down, and then up, and then down again, and I didn't even notice not making the wrong turn that takes you to the electric-fenced field overlooking the back of town. As I passed by the lawn on the other side of the river from the recreation center pool, there were three guys playing horseshoes. From their voices I'd thought they were old, but on sight they were in their late 20s or early 30s, one full-bearded, another long-haired, the third drinking beer sitting on a couple of cooler. The horseshoes spiraled as they flew, and one I saw actually hooked the post.

As I came across the driveway I could hear the humming of a bird at my window feeder. I stood still as it swiveled out and hovered at attention, then went back to feed. Several times it answered angry chirps from other hummingbirds waiting their turns in the birch tree; every time it stood out on guard from the feeder I could hear the humming of its wings increase in volume, as if it were sending out a pulse of sound when it braked to a stop in midair.

I just love these insects

Water Torture

This morning the rain didn't begin; instead it arrived. I could hear the drops on the leaves in the park, then on the trees in the back yard, finally on the rood of the bedroom dormer. I've lost count of how many days it's been raining; even if the sunn comes out, that just makes it hot and damp instead of cold and damp. The outdoor thermometer sensor is permanently stuck on 98% humidity (probably because something is living inside it) and bath towels never dry.

Other than that, things are dandy.

News from the insect kingdom

Most of you know that earwigs do not in fact crawl into people's ears at night. So where, when they're not hiding under threshholds or bits of plastic sheeting in the basement or between coiled grounding wires and the wall ditto, do they crawl into?

It turns out they crawl into the stem cavities of stone fruit, to wit the peach that was sitting on the counter, and thence into the stone itself, should it have cracked open during ripening. Then, when you're cutting the peach up to eat over cottage cheese for lunch, they crawl back out again.

Maybe it's as much like an ear as an insect can find and still get a few days of peace and quiet.

Why "Intelligent Design" is Blasphemy

I was thinking the other day about how hard it is to make a fossil. First, your organism has to die someplace where it won't just be eaten immediately -- either by a predator, a scavenger or by the myriad bugs, bacteria and fungi that specialize in returning plants and animals to the biomass. Then it has to lie undisturbed for somewhere between 100,000 and a million years while just the right amount of water, suffused with just the right amounts of the right chemicals, leaches away the remaining organic structure and deposits durable (well, reasonably durable) minerals in its place.

At any time during those millennia, a protofossil can be destroyed by some animal burrowing through it, by a flood that washes it away and crumbles it to bits, by a trickle of the wrong kind of water, by any living thing that finds it and can use it as food or roughage. As a result, the best fossil records are typically found in places that were least hospitable to life back in the eon. If something died where other creatures lived, it got eaten by those creatures, large or small. End of story.

The only places where fossils had a chance of forming were deserts of one kind or another -- sandy, rocky places, toxic mudflats, ponds or lakes full of anoxic or poisonous water, tar pits, far ocean depths not yet colonized by life. Some unlucky creature wanders out into the waste (or falls there or is dragged or blown by current or storm) and dies out of ken of the great web of recycled life. In the Gobi Desert, for example paleontologists found the skeletons of dinosaurs engulfed by sandstorms even as they were trying to kill each other.

There are also fragmentary fossils, of course -- sometimes a few bones or a tooth make it out of the eating zone before they're destroyed. But in general, it's a miracle that fossils form at all. Which is why my blood boils every time I hear about some creationist blowhard going on about how the fossil record doesn't prove anything because it's incomplete. It's like watching someone try to argue that the New York Times isn't a daily newspaper because you can't go out to the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island and dig up a copy of every single edition since 1894.

Such creationists put me in mind of sleazy lawyers cross-examining witnesses and trying to get them to recant identifications of a perpetrator's face because they can't also say what color socks the perp was wearing. Instead of reverence for the confluence of natural processes that bring fossils to us, they promote some kind of bizarre notion that all the preserved bones and bodies of ancient creatures were put in the ground as some kind of test to see just how far human beings can go to deny the evidence of their senses and the logical conclusions of their minds.

Which brings me to the Intelligent Design folks, the most recent of the conspiracies to prevent the teaching of evolution. All of their arguments about how improbable it is that evolution could have come up with some configuration of body parts or some particular protein seem to boil down to "I can't understand how this works, so God must have done it directly."

And that's just wrong. Not just factually wrong (which it is, according to every bit of evidence and logic that many thousands of people have been able to cajole out of the world around them for the past couple of centuries) but wrong because it reeks of hubris, aka the sin of Pride. A few not-very-bright people set themselve up as arbiters of exactly how the almighty (assuming one exists) must have accomplished the current state of the world, all because they have neither the intellectual understanding nor the faith to believe that the task could have been done in some other way that they can't comprehend.

Jesuit scientists (the Vatican has a fine astronomical observatory, for example) believe the the world is a great book, and that one way to live their faith is to read that book and understand, as far as they are able, the marvelous works of its author. Even if you don't agree with their attribution of the text, you can share their awe at the volume itself -- the universe really is an amazing place. And the degree to which human beings have been able to comprehend it, working from what little information filters down to this tiny dust mote in the middle of infinity, is perhaps even more amazing.

But the "Intelligent Design" folks, having barely skimmed the first few pages of the book that is the universe, think they know how it all comes out. It's too hard for them -- for whatever reason-- to follow the langage and the argument that have actually been written, so they substitute their own version and slam the book shut. Their creator gave humanity this truly remarkable universe to explore, and the intelligence and creativity needed to explore it, and instead of approaching it with the reverence and determination it demands, they just spit on the gift and toss it on the ground like the Duke of Gloucester. "Another damned, thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Jehovah?"

Words fail me.