Research Sabbatical in the Wild West: Dr. Mark Johnson
Dr. Mark D. Johnson, associate professor of Biology, is heading west for a few months of exploring. His sabbatical will take him through the Rocky Mountains and Yellowstone National Park, out to the coastal waters of Puget Sound and up to British Columbia as he investigates some wild places and collects data and photographs for a book on ecology.Mark D. Johnson, Ph.D.
On the road again, like a gypsy , I head down the highway... that tune runs through my head most times when I take off on a road trip. First though, a question for you. If you were taking off for somewhere, exact destination undetermined, for between 2 and seven months to write and do research and so on, what would you pack? (As you will undoubtedly see as the journey unfolds, I did not just limit myself to a backpack and tent. Had to take a microscope and plankton net, of course. And couldn't skip the books on boat repair in case I get stuck off the coast of British Columbia. And what would the evening sunset be like on the Puget Sound without a Celtic Harp's haunting tones? But once again, I have caught myself wondering what others would pack for such a trip...
Long first day. Connecticut to Grand Rapids Michigan. Would've been faster to go via Pennsylvania even though the map showed it as a bit longer. Going through Canada was nice, but getting back into the USA took hours of waiting in line at the border. Made it into a 16 hour day instead of a 13 hour day. Why is it that it takes 5 or 10 minutes to get into Canada and hours to get into the USA? Maybe they are not as paranoid about terrorists? Maybe there is a reason they are not? Maybe we could learn something from them?
Then again going through PA I never would have seen the beautiful port town of Sarnia, Ontario, from the bridge.
I'd forgotten how huge the Great Lakes are!
... and there are some great isolated places on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
This trip has taken on psychic connections with my recent obsession with sailboats. In upper Michigan I went down to the docks in a randomly selected small town and found that the Nina and the Pinta were docked there temporarily! (I do not know where the Santa Maria was.)
The St. Croix River (in Minnesota) was one of the first rivers in the USA to be designated as wild and scenic.
For some folks the "West" begins with the Mississippi. For me it is when you can see the foothills of the mountains.
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So, who takes pictures of of plain black rocks besides geologists? Well... these are 2.3 billion years old. That is 2,300 millions! Just about the time that the atmosphere started to collect oxygen from all the photosynthetic bacterial waste. Talk about climate change! Killed off most of life on the planet that toxic oxygen did. |
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The drive through the badlands at sunset and sunrise show off the sculptured landscape best if you can time your arrival in the area.
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Twelve and a half miles down a washboard dirt road, that might shake your car apart, you see why the native peoples of this area fought so hard to keep Custer and his army and the miners and sod-busters out as long as they could. When is the last time you can recall falling asleep by moonlight and shooting stars and then waking up with no alarm to a yellow dawn and the liquid songs of meadowlarks? ... mmmmmm.... |
However, while I may be a microbe chauvinist, I am just as
taken with charismatic mega-fauna as the next bloke. Driving through
the gloaming looking for a campsite in the canyons and grasslands of the
Badlands National Park in South Dakota, I got halted in my tracks by a
small herd of bison blocking my way. Magic!
One of the advantages of tent camping: No luxury hotels have this view (above) of Southern Montana and Northern Wyoming.
Something I find intriguing: a rainbow of colorful microorganisms arranging themselves prismatically - but really an indication of the heat of the pool. Why does it arrange that way?
Something poetic about art and science and reflections of beauty would be appropriate here. ... As above - so below?
Used to be some huge critters around, back in the day. This one was a Giant Red Cedar. Conundrum: We love the trees, but are also fond of cheap lumber. Thus there are clear-cutting scars on our hills. (Photo below is of a forest you own. Yeah. You own a huge amount of forest land you maybe were not aware of. If you are a citizen of this country much of the western lands belong to you; and via congress and the executive branch bureaucrazies, you control what is done with these lands.)
Wind is free. That may be the problem with using it for energy. Hard for corporations to reap huge profits, so development is slower than it could be. However, as you can see in the two pictures below, we have come a long way. The first one is an original windmill from Holland - taken apart - shipped to Lynden, Washington - and then reassembled. (I saw it during the local raspberry festival there 19 July).
The other windmills - in the right hand picture - are of recent mfg placed in the fileds of South Dakota and Minnesota. Interesting to consider that the entire energy supply for the USA (including transport using electric vehicles) could be supplied by such devices set up above the sunflower fields of South Dakota and on top of the places in Wyoming that have already been ruined by mining and fossil fuel extraction. (Not everywhere has 24/7 wind. These states do.) That's it. No more Gulf oil gushers needed. No more mountain tops need to be removed in West Virginia to get at the coal cheaply. No long-shot new "clean coal" technologies need to be invented. Just use existing technology and tap the wind.
I just got back from a grocery store here in Washington state that provides free hookup electrical recharging for electric vehicles when you shop at their place! Use your imagination. What could our lives be like?!
The facilities to build the windmills are located in Detroit and other job troubled mid-western towns. The skilled labor to do it still exists in the USA. We need not wait for all of those jobs to go to China (currently the largest mfg of wind mills). We could stop bailing out bankers and GM and simply fund the project like we did WWII. But instead of a trashed Europe and Japan as an end product, we would have a clean-energy USA. It would take some strong voices from the citizens of the USA to get heard above the noise of the oil industry lobby though.
Ancient Ginkos once formed a forest in this area. Their fossils are located in the park on the other side of the river. Seeing the Columbia again melted my heart.
Lookin' at boats in Puget Sound. I Have come off of looking for the perfect boat, and am wallowing in the different possibilities. Best way to get up into the islands of the Pacific NW for my study in the autumn is by boat. Very different seeing boats up close and personal as compared with pictures on an internet ad.
Just happened to visit Blaine Washington on the day that the "Tall Ships" came into harbor. Gotta love "co-incidences" like that!
Ghostly volcanoes below a daytime moon provide a very spiritual backdrop to modern reality on the Puget Sound. Warm days (60's) recently = the mountains are in full view. Cold days (50's) = not so much. Clouds and mountains are a BIG part of why this area is green and the Columbia River basin a couple of hours away is a desert.
Visiting my former mentor, Dr. Rhoades, in Bellingham before he takes off for New Zealand to visit his daughter. Fred got me started on studying fungi and made a huge difference in my biology/natural history education.
Staying with a friend at Bellingham Co-housing. Very cool concept. Private ownership of your own home - combined with intentional community creation. Fabulous folks. (Check out the link below the photo for more pics and data about the place.)
The people who saw me here probably thought I was having a picnic with a friend, not realizing that I was "really" studying biology. Hmmm.... Cheese, avocado, nectarines, distilled spirits. It's all biological right?
So August has arrived already! Whew! (Time moves so much faster the older you get. Remember when you were 8 and a summer seemed like forever? Just a proportion between the length of the person's memory and the time being considered.) Summer's in full swing here in the Pac NW. Perfect 67 degrees and light rain for the Anacortes arts festival. Kansas City blues band on the stage and a few kids and grandparents in raincoats dancing in the street. ... no photo, so use your imagination.
Here is a new taxi service in the making with even better gas mileage than my Prius. And when the window "Isinglass" is snapped on all around, there's no problem with rain either!
Fairhaven Harbor could be a good place to moor in the summer whatever boat I might eventually get?
Big enough for me to stand up in - but boy! would it be a job to sail her single-handed! Then again ...
Up in the high country around Shuksan Mountain photographing and finding research locations (small lakes). I will try and see about how to post some desk-top screen-saver quality, large format, shots that I have taken of these mountains.
Headed to Tahoma a.k.a. Tacoma (renamed Mount Rainier by some white guys in recent years)...
John Muir visited here in 1888 and stated, "... the most luxuriant and the most extravagantly beautiful of all the alpine gardens I ever beheld in all my mountain-top wanderings." (If you don't know John Muir = you should check him out! Marvelous person!)
Here are a couple example shady shots I took:
Nice to encounter charismatic megafauna that don't run away. Hip hip hooray for the USA National Park system!
However, my focus is supposed to be on the little folks in these environments, which I am observing here with hand-lens. The lichens on the rocks (above) and the trees (below) attest to the health of the atmosphere here! Fabulous diversity!
No. "Taint moss. That's lichen on those branches. Fungi and algae symbiont partners.
But given the environment; it is easy to get distracted from the microbial task at hand.
A visit to a "deserted" beach just before sunset can be beautiful...
... but it is also low tide, and a good time to investigate the sea creatures exposed at such times. The barnacles and seastars on the exposed rock are so alive!
You don't have to be on a big trip like I am to appreciate the little beauties around. Turn over a fern leaf on your next walk and have a peek at the evident fecundity - thousands of sporangia are getting ready to open at this time of year. Millions upon millions of spores await release on the underside of each leaf. You are bathed in life all the time! Enjoy it.
shop till you drop!
Yeah. Made it into the city of Seattle today (looking for a folding bike that would fit inside my car or inside a small boat) and got it shoved in my face, once again, how many more people love to go to the mall than to go for a hike. Amazing numbers of people! Beautiful mall, if such an adjective should be applied to malls, and the entire mall parking lot was FULL with folks driving around following pedestrians in hopes that they were heading to their car and would then vacate a space! 100's of autos stalking people all around the mall lots. It would be humorous, if it were not so sad.
Port Townsend hosts a Wooden Boat Festival every year in September, and has been doing so for a long time. This year I finally made it for a little bit of it.
Would love to go for the whole three days of seminars some day... when I have a boat shed and can start
building one of my own!
A cutter ketch would definitely be the way to go for studying ocean life! Sampling the plankton from my little dinghy like I have been doing, or from the dock, is just not as cool as getting out on the Salish Sea in something like this one above.
Going to the Olympic Peninsula also offered me the opportunity to meet up with a former student of mine who is now an SJC alum, and hear about the current studies in sustainable agriculture that she is doing just south of Port Townsend. She has taken her SJC Green Team Community Garden idea one step further! Go Kate!!!
Visual sensation = sensational visions. Isn't it the intensity and quality of the color of some images that trips our senses into the apprehension of beauty?
Then why are we sometimes "happier" when we can see what it is a photo "of" ??
Sea and islands and mountains give context to the color? We are perhaps more comfortable when we recognize what it is a picture of, so we can add our own creativity ? "Oh, it is a sunset with mountains," and suddenly the photograph acquires depth. The 3rd dimensionality of the image is created by the viewer, not the painter or photographer.
... but, then again...
... sometimes we see beauty in the forms themselves. And color or its lack are irrelevant. Not because the forms remind us of something else... just the intrinsic awesomeness of the shapes themselves.
Life is so amazing!
Washingtonians grow lots of fruit. Visited the research gardens. What fruits grow best? How? etc.
Not much gardening space at my house to have an orchard, so how about an edible pear fence?
... or maybe apples. Most apples in the stores are bred for shelf life, color, "appeal," or something besides taste and texture. You won't find these on the shelf - but boy are they great! Yum!! And quite a variety are grown here at the volunteer gardens. Ones from Russia and from the 1700s and some odd ugly ones that are superb!
A great group of volunteer gardeners and orchardists meet every week to take care of the place and the plants. If I lived out here, it is the kind of thing I could sure get into doing.
Time to be heading east now that October is here. Switch from photographer to writer.
Time to say goodbye to the West for a while...
Lots of miles.
Amazing amount of land being tilled by fossil-fuel powered machines; irrigated by water mined from below ground; fertilized by fossil-fuel derived chemicals. So nutty to think that mining this soil to produce corn-oil and ethanol will solve the energy crisis somehow. Costs more in fossil fuels to produce the "sustainable fuels" than we can get from such harvests.
In Iowa I came across this sculpture/exhibit at a rest stop. The posts show how the depth of the top soil has been reduced over the years by the kind of farming we do; kinda like strip-mining, only slower. The words on the columns are as follows:
"To see rich land eaten away be erosion, to stand by as continual cultivation on sloping fields wears away the best soil, is enough to make a good farmer sick at heart. My grandfather, watching this process, used to speak of the voiceless land. In our time we have seen the process reach an acute stage, and we have at last begun to take to heart the meaning of soil exploitation."
- Henry A. Wallace
I think Wallace may have been a bit optimistic. The above was stated early last century. The columns show what has happened since. More info on such at:
http://www.winrock.org/wallace/wallacecenter/wallace/lectures.asp
We seem to have given up on our heritage. From a nation of growers and creators of things, we appear to have become mere gluttonous consumers - and farming has transmogrified - becoming "agribiz," a subsidiary of the oil industry. So few of us have ever known the joy of eating food we have grown in a garden of our own - that we have become further and further separated from our ground of being. I'm not even talking "nature" or "wilderness." I'm just talking about "food" here! No wonder so many people feel lost and adrift. The book "Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder" might need a sequel of "Last Kid in the Garden: Saving our Children from Obesity." I hope SJC's "Green Team Community Garden" did well this year. Supposed to be a bunch of kids introduced to growing veges in it this year.
After all of my own wandering and drifting during the last few months, it was extremely sweet to be greeted by some fresh tomatoes that had started all on their own from my compost pile in my absence.
Yum. Life is good! (Now all I have to do is figure out how to grow a garden on a sailboat. Hmmm...)
Gas mileage log:
Prius hybrid log. Miles per gallon (mpg) during trip
Across NY at 65 miles per hour = 50.3 mpg
Ontario and lower Michigan at 50 to 70 miles per hour = 47.1 mpg
Upper Peninsula and Wisconsin at 70 mph = 49.0 mpg
Minnesota and South Dakota at 70 to 75 mph (Speed limit is 75 in SD!) = 49.0 mpg
Only 46mpg coming over the Big Horn Mountains in Wyoming (elevation 9668 feet = almost 2 miles high!)
The Prius likes mountains! Up and down along the continental divide = 52.0 mpg!
The Prius loves some parts of Montana; 61.6 mpg in the valleys of SW Montana.
Bombing around in the Salish Sea area (on land): 51.7 mpg (Averaged over the last thousand miles or so)
Time to check in with the folks in charge of off-setting my carbon emissions. My Prius may get great gas mileage - but it still burns fossil fuel => unneeded CO2 into our atmosphere. The Mindo Cloudforest Foundation folks in Ecuador (who I discovered during my last adventure in 2009) take care of my carbon foot print. Who takes care of yours? If you don't already have someone planting trees for you somewhere else, check 'em out at Mindo Cloudforest Foundation.
http://mindocloudforest.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=5&Itemid=82
