Time to move on -- part two

I took a vacation a few weeks ago, back to where I was born (SF Bay Area). While it was good to see some of my old haunts as a kid (San Francisquito Creek, Perry Lane) it made me think: Damn, when did I get old?

My wife and daughter had never seen where I grew up, and my wife had to go to the Bay Area to attend the GDC (Game Developers Conference), so I figured -- what the hell. I hadn't been back to the Bay Area since I left for Arizona shortly after the 1989 World Series earthquake.

I was born in Palo Alto in the early 1950s, and my mother was a confirmed Bay Area inhabitant. As a kid I got to see many of the things that my mom valued as a kid. For me the most important things were the San Francisco Zoo and Steinhart Aquarium (I subsequently worked at Steinhart for years on and off, including and after the summer of 1970, mainly with the herps -- that's reptiles and amphibians for Ann Coulter Official Chat members, and others who just can't make it past STDs).

Anyhow, Dr. Earl S. Herald ran Steinhart Aquarium in the 50s and 60s, and also was the host of a show called Science in Action, which I never missed. While Dr. Herald was an ichthyologist (that's a scientist who studies fish, for ACOC members) he regularly had herps on the show too. I believe that the first time I had ever heard of an Elephant's Trunk Snake (Acrochordus javanicus) was when Dr. Herald was hauling one around on stage. I started a correspondence with him when I was eight, telling him how much I enjoyed his program and asking him questions about various creatures (usually reptiles), and he ALWAYS wrote back. These days a busy man like that would just funnel letters from some kid off to his secretary so that she could shoot off some form letter, but not Dr. Herald. Anyhow, I kept writing to Steinhart through high school, and then my dad arranged for me to get a summer job with a friend of his in the San Francisco Bay Area, salary, room and board included. One weekend I went up to San Francisco, and dropped in at Steinhart just to see if I could volunteer. Karl Switak, the supervising herpetologist at the aquarium who had also responded to my letters for years, knew who I was immediately, and I was set up as a volunteer on the spot. And what an experience it was.

While volunteers aren't supposed to have anything to do with venomous reptiles, I was tossed a set of keys which allowed me to have the run of Steinhart Aquarium, and told "If you get bitten, I don't know anything about it!" At the age of 17, I got to work with things I had only read about since I was a kid: bushmasters, Gila monsters, mambas, big constrictors, Old World vipers, rattlers of every species including the largest: the Eastern diamondback -- I remember one they had in a box in the holding room had a head that was about as wide across as a human hand. That's a big snake. Also in that room was a full-sized adult indigo snake (Drymarchon corais) -- the largest species of non-venomous snake in the US. It remains the only one I have ever handled. And that was just in the holding room, which had more stuff in it than most zoos had for a display collection. Additionally, there were about six or so species of cobras at Steinhart when I was there, including a king cobra measuring about twelve feet or so. At Steinhart I got to experience the feeling of king cobra intelligence -- these were ancient displays, and working behind the reptile panel I would occasionally glance at the big door at the end of the panel. It had a round porthole in it through which you could keep an eye on the king, and invariably, while I was working, it was keeping its eye on me. I would often find it looking at me through the porthole as I worked, and its expression definitely showed something like intelligence...I'm not the only snake person to say this, either. The king cobra's diet consists primarily of snakes (hence its generic name, Ophiophagus -- that's Latin, for ACOC members -- meaning snake eater) and so one of my jobs when I wasn't at the aquarium was to cruise the roads looking for roadkilled snakes to toss into the freezer at Steinhart to thaw later for meals. And remember I'm talking about antiquated exhibits here -- modern exhibits for cobras such as this have a remote door that you can raise up to allow the snake to access a darkened hide box. You pull on a cable, the snake notices the door, and naturally wants to go into the dark to be away from the public. Once the snake's in there, you drop the door to keep the snake in there, and then you can safely service the display. Not at Steinhart -- to feed the king cobra you would look through the porthole to make sure it wasn't right at the door, yank the door open, fling a thawed snake into the cage and hopefully slam it before the snake got out into the hallway with you. Usually it would snag its dinner in mid-air, and you were off the hook, but I've gotta tell you that this feeding method wouldn't be allowed at today's zoos.

Anyhow, the old Steinhart Aquarium was a wonderland for me -- a teenager whose whole life's desire was to someday be a famous herpetologist. With its neoclassical structure, built after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 (in 1923, I believe), Steinhart Aquarium was a magnificent building, with columns, a whale fountain in front, and a huge swamp area with alligators, crocodiles, and alligator snapping turtles right in front of you when you walked in the door. I got to climb around in the swamp, feed the gators, occasionally capture an alligator snapper to haul to the Aquarium roof for some sun to kill fungus on its shell, and I remember donning a yellow rain slicker so that I could haul a young harbor seal up to the roof for the same reason. I was trusted and felt valued by the staff. At the age of seventeen I was living a dream, and working at Steinhart Aquarium remains the highlight of my life.

After the 1989 earthquake damaged the Aquarium, rather than repair it, they decided to rip the entire thing down, and in the place of its magnificence we have a modern thing that looks like an Erector Set gone mad -- Renzo Piano the architect notwithstanding, it's just one more concrete and steel building, but at least it has this really neat plant-covered roof. There is almost no reptile collection. The current thing in zoos and aquariums is multi-species exhibits to illustrate relationships between organisms, and that's what's at the California Academy of Sciences now (Steinhart was always THE main part of the Academy, but how they can continue to call it Steinhart Aquarium astonishes me). You be the judge -- here's the old Steinhart:



and here's the "new" one:



The whale fountain's gone, the columns are gone (except for replicas inside the building, which are just heartbreaking), and it made me realize that, yes indeed, forty years have really passed by since my seventeenth summer. That summer I got to see the musical "Hair," and the movie "Easy Rider." I had my first experience riding on commuter trains alone to a big city, and learning how to successfully make it across the city on public transit. My boss took me around Alcatraz in a sailboat, and I watched the Indians, who that summer were occupying the island, hanging their laundry in cell windows. And that summer I got to work in what once was possibly the greatest public aquarium in the US -- certainly on the West Coast at least -- and I was trusted to work with venomous snakes that could kill you easily and fairly quickly. I haven't even really talked about the fish collection, mainly because herps were my primary interest, but when I wasn't working with herps, I was crawling over shark tanks on a catwalk, or feeding a huge sea bass or alligator gars, or maybe just spending a few minutes with Butterball the manatee, scrubbing his back with a deck brush. Steinhart Aquarium was an amazing place, and now, green roof notwithstanding, the soul has been removed. I'm not at all sure that Ignatz and Sigmund Steinhart, the original source of funds for the building of the aquarium, would be very pleased at the place now.

There's an old saying, which I am sure you probably have heard: You can't go home again. Perhaps it's true...I'll never visit the Academy of Sciences again and sort of wish I hadn't seen what they turned it into. My old house on Perry Lane, where I grew up across from Ken Kesey (author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and prominent druggie) is still there. If you've ever read Tom Wolfe's book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test you're somewhat familiar with my neighborhood in my era. My grandfather built that house, which once had a HUGE Victorian-style greenhouse full of orchids in the backyard. The house, surprisingly, looks much the same, although it was once behind a hedge which hid most of it:



but the huge oak tree that was once in the middle of the street is gone now -- my mom proudly told me that her first date ran into that tree -- dead of disease, and a new little one has been planted to replace it:



with a little plaque commemorating it -- when I was a kid it was Perry LANE, not Avenue:



I went to other places from my youth, too, and they had changed -- an example is the Pulgas Water Temple. The Pulgas (Spanish for "fleas") Water Temple is a structure that was built at the end of the aqueduct that channels water from the Hetch Hetchy Reservoir in the Yosemite Valley to the Bay Area.



After the great earthquake and fire of 1906, the residents of San Francisco decided that they needed more water so that they wouldn't have to watch their entire city burn down again, and so Yosemite was screwed up by damming off a valley to make a reservoir. While this would NEVER happen in today's ultra-sensitive enviro-society -- the most they do these days is screw up pristine desert by building acres of windmills -- the Water Temple was another spot from my youth that's been changed irreparably. When I was REALLY young, the inside of the temple was an open hole, where kids could watch the staggering amount of water swirl and gush inside the temple as it reached its final destination all the way from Yosemite. Then, in the 70s, I suppose, they put a screen over the top, probably after some druggie jumped in the hole or something, but the water still flowed. Not too long ago they decided to stop the water flow to the temple so that the water could be treated somewhere else before it went to Crystal Springs Reservoir. Now why they couldn't treat the water AFTER it left the temple is a mystery to me, but I'm just one of the uneducated masses. So now what you have is a really ornate structure with a screened-over hole inside. At least they haven't torn the quote with the Biblical plaque off yet, but who knows -- they might switch it out for a plaque commemorating Obama's election. That would make as much sense.



I suppose this kind of change, often for the sake of change alone, is always to be expected, but it makes me wonder: rather than "you can't go home again," perhaps it should really be: you shouldn't go home again. Old memories are sometimes best left as they are, without any updating. However, as the title of this post notes -- perhaps it was just, again, time to move on.

At least San Francisquito Creek, where I scrounged for lizards and three-spined stickleback (a type of fish, again for ACOC members) as a kid looked about the same:



So not everything was different. But, I've gotta say, while I showed my wife and Katie my old neighborhood, and wanted them to see it, and while not all of it changed -- I think that will about do it for memory lane. Getting old, folks.

Happy birthday, Mr. Lincoln!

Today Abraham Lincoln would be 201 years old. I view him, and many of the historians consistently do also, as the greatest president in the history of the United States. He grew up in the middle of nowhere (at least it was the middle of nowhere in the early 1800s), had no more than a fourth-grade education (and not much of that), and pretty much taught himself how to read, write and speak effectively.

People back then, when Lincoln was president, were no kinder to him than they are to presidents in modern times. He was called a "nigger lover," "the perfect baboon" (this by his very own, and useless General McClellan), and constantly threatened with assassination. He was in the habit of staying at the Soldiers' Home outside of Washington, rather than the White House during the hotter months, and on one of his solo rides to the house had his top hat shot through and knocked off his head (henceforth he was accompanied by a military escort). His wife, Mary, did her very best to drive him mad with her irrational behavior, but he took it all in stride and continued to work for the good of America, not wanting to be the president under which the Union would dissolve. Under his watch, the United States of America was reunited and slavery was ended in the country for all time.

There are probably more books in existence about Abraham Lincoln than about any other person on the planet (unless you want to tally up JFK conspiracy-theory books). Many praise him and/or simply chronicle his life. But then there are those revisionist historians who, having apparently nothing better to do, make up disgusting theories about how Lincoln was supposedly a homosexual based on the fact that sometimes lawyers shared beds while riding the Eighth Judicial Circuit in the backwoods of Illinois, there being few establishments where one could obtain a room while making the rounds of various courtrooms. There are the rabid Lincoln-haters who blame him for any number of ills inflicted upon the US economy, or for federalizing the government, or tramping on the Constitution (his suspension of the writ of habeus corpus is commonly brought up, ignoring the fact that subsequently he was found to be justified in doing this by the Supreme Court, being thrust into an emergency situation that called for emergency actions).

I find Abraham Lincoln to be, in my opinion, the greatest American, the greatest statesman, and the greatest president in our history. There are those who, possibly because they will never be thought of as great at all, feel that it is necessary to spit on his memory in an attempt to feel more important. It pains me to see that the only American who has his birthday honored these days is Martin Luther King, Jr., which was accomplished by combining Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays into a single amorphous "Presidents Day" and thus avoiding increasing the number of federal holidays. It apparently was more important to pander to blacks by doing this, even though King might possibly have not been famous (or free, for that matter) had Abraham Lincoln not been born; in fact, I believe that MLK would object to this being done to Lincoln's birthday if he had any way to comment on it.

President Lincoln died at the hands of a southern sympathizer and racist fanatic named John Wilkes Booth, and the world was poorer for it. He never was able to do things like travel to California or to Jerusalem (as he once stated he would like to have done once he was through being President). The nation was deprived of his gentle and humorous wisdom and his absolute belief that the USA was, and would continue to be, the greatest nation in the world's history. Often people play the game: "If I could spend an evening talking and having dinner with a historical figure it would be..."; many people choose Jesus as this person, possibly because they think they're supposed to think that way. The way I look at it, I'll be spending eternity in Jesus' company. Whether or not it makes me look bad to nix an evening with Jesus in favor of one with Mr. Lincoln, I've often wished I could spend a day in the company of Abraham Lincoln, just to hear his stories, jokes, and anecdotes, and to experience his personality in real life. However, while Lincoln never chose a particular church or denomination, I trust that he's waiting for us now, and perhaps I'll get to spend some time with him after all.

If you want to read some good books about Mr. Lincoln, I'd recommend these:
Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin -- great on Lincoln's presidency and his cabinet
Lincoln, by David Herbert Donald -- excellent overall biography unsurpassed except by the next one:
Abraham Lincoln: A Life, by Michael Burlingame -- the newest biography with access to heretofore unknown material -- two huge volumes that I couldn't stop reading until I was done.

About the assassination of Abraham Lincoln I recommend:
Blood on the Moon, by Edward Steers
American Brutus, by Michael Kauffman
Manhunt, by James L. Swanson

One good book that I wholeheartedly recommend on the mindset of Lincoln's wife, Mary, is:

The Madness of Mary Lincoln, by Jason Emerson -- just an excellent work by a very meticulous researcher.

I hope that you will give some thought to Abraham Lincoln today on his birthday, and that, if you are only basically familiar with the life and death of our 16th president, you will be inspired to learn more about this great man.

God bless his memory.

Herp

Time to move on

After my father died, and a little soul-searching, I decided to take a little time off from the work world, finish up some classes that needed finishing up, and do some things that I always wanted to do. Hence the new motorcycle -- I know, I know, it's one of those things old guys do in a vain attempt to recapture their youth. However, since I COULD do it, I did it, and I'm glad to say that, other than a slowing of reflexes requiring me to look a little farther ahead than I used to, I don't seem to have lost the ability to ride.

It's been about twenty years since I rode my last Beemer, and not wanting to own any other brand, and BMWs being so costly, I had just about written them off. But I bit the bullet in October, and now I'm getting my skills back, slowly but surely. In fact, I may be riding to California to have a custom seat made this month, and I'll see if I can navigate the freeways there. Ain't looking forward to that, but I'll deal with it.

Things have changed on BMW motorcycles since I first started riding in the 70s, some for the good and some for the, well, not-so-good, but the good outweighs the bad. More horsepower, more bells and whistles (anti-lock brakes and automatic suspension adjustment on a motorcycle!). Missing is the hand work that used to be apparent in the pinstriping, etc. But all in all, I can't complain.

The one thing that has changed in the twenty years I took off from motorcycling is -- assholes with cellphones. Twenty years ago there were no cell phones, or at least not like we know them now. It was bad enough that people twenty years ago could look at you and just not have it register that you were actually driving a motor vehicle. But that was only SOME people. Now it seems that the majority of people driving the roads spend half of any drive with a phone jammed on their ear, talking about very important things like Buffy's coming-out party or "wow, I think that guy in Biology class is cute," etc. I find I spend a lot more time making absolutely sure that the drivers around me aren't semi-comatose and actually do notice me.

The good thing, and luckily I've been quick enough, is that with the massive amount of horsepower vs. the small amount of weight involved in a motorcycle means that, given a couple seconds of warning I can rocket the hell out of the way of cars careening into my path. I do have to say, however, that the time has come for law enforcement officers to be authorized to shoot to kill cell phone-using drivers. We'll see about that.

So, I'm semi-retired, I guess. Next month we're heading to the Bay Area to revisit my home where I grew up, and I have a tour arranged where I used to work at the biggest public aquarium on the west coast. I'm sort of excited about seeing things that I saw when I was a kid, although the aquarium has been completely overhauled. I hope they saved some of the old structure. And San Francisco Zoo (Fleishhacker's Zoo when I was a kid) should largely be the same -- old-time structures for Pachyderms, Lions, etc.

Lots of things happening, and there isn't an internet flamer that can bother me anymore, so life's looking pretty good about now.

Love,

The rejuvenative power of Christmas

This will be my fifty-sixth Christmas. That's quite a number of Christmases under my belt. As the rush began this year, as it does every year, I tended to avoid thinking about it, because real life continued to intrude: problems with students (and parents who find it easier to blame the teacher than to discipline their little darlings), demands from school administration, and a constant struggle to keep up with grading papers and to maintain the gradebook. My father dying in September. Problems with my brother, the "executor" of my father's estate (a position I turned down originally because I thought that having an involved family member in a position such as that was a mistake), who declared, after I objected to the fact that in over a month's time passing I had gotten one sentence from him about how affairs were proceeding which amounted to "Don't worry about it," that he had no interest in maintaining a relationship with me after everything was finished(I'm now just dealing directly with the lawyer, and my brother can continue to think of himself as Very Important, which seems to be essential to his personality).

I've made starting plans to go to the Peruvian jungle next year on a hunt for bushmasters -- the largest venomous snake in the Western Hemisphere and the largest pit viper of them all -- because capturing one has been a childhood dream as yet unfulfilled. It sounds as though I'll be going with just a guide, and a cook and interpreter, into the middle of nowhere for two or three weeks -- I'm not a tour kind of guy, plus I doubt they'd let you capture and photograph big venomous snakes on tours.

Lots of things tend to wear you down, and to put aside the things you found important as a younger person because "real life" is more "important" than "childish things," but Christmas always reminds me of these things, brings them back to me, and makes me realize that it would be a shame if one let trivial (or perhaps not so trivial) occurrences in one's life erase the beauty and meaning of Christmas. And so, each December, I force myself to haul my butt out of the morass of self-pity, the "what-ifs," the "should haves," etc., and to remember what Christmas means to me.

I remember, around this time every year, what my Christmases were like as a youth. They looked like the photo up there at the top of this page: smiling mom, huge tree with BIG lights and tinsel, nativity scene on the mantel, and my dad's old World War II olive green GI stockings hung on the fireplace screen, full of things from Santa. And I continue to wait for Santa every year, because as far as I am concerned (let me go on record as saying this to the World Wide Web) Santa Claus is real.



I see Santa in children's eyes around this time of year, my daughter's eyes particularly. There's magic in just saying the name, Santa Claus, for me. When I think about Santa, I am instantly transported to a time where I had no interest in, or knowledge of, politics, wars, or the bad things people do to each other just because they can do them. I remember the smells of my mom's Christmas cookies, and the sights, on Christmas morning, of a huge tree that Santa Claus magically brought to our house every Christmas Eve, where before there was a plain living room with perhaps a few Christmas cards as decorations but nothing else. Santa also brought candy canes, and left a palpable presence in our house that I could almost feel, as I realized that the great Christmas saint had actually been in our living room, and had taken the time to do something nice for yet another family.

I tend to forget that presence over the year following Christmas, and, upon reflection, have come to think that's a shame. The Christmas feeling, fleeting as it is, should not be fleeting at all, but remain in one's heart throughout the year, and it's sad that this feeling tends to be driven out or squashed by events that really should have no effect upon one's happiness at all. It comes back to me occasionally, if only as a brief thought passing through my mind, when I smell cinnamon (my mom's spice of choice at Christmas) and I instantly think of this time of year, even in July. I think, at those times, the things I'm thinking now: how sad it is to have that Christmas Feeling driven out of one's life every year, when it is that sort of feeling that should help to sustain us. To give us hope for the future. Yes, Santa is part of that feeling; he will always be intertwined, in my heart, with the story of the Christ Child's birth, and I have always associated the presents brought by Santa Claus with those given to the Child in Bethlehem by the three wise men.

As I begin a new chapter in my life -- that of retiree, young enough to enjoy things I've always dreamed of, be it bushmasters, Australia, England and the sparkle in my daughter's eyes when she thinks of Santa -- I hereby resolve that Christmas will never leave my heart. God bless it. God bless Santa, whose visit I will await with as much excitement as I had as a kid. And God bless us -- every one.

Herp

Reflections on my dad

My father died on September 21st, and I have had some time to reflect upon what was a long and unique life for the person who was Frank Ford.

My relationship with my dad was off-and-on. Never a warm man, my father was a child of the Great Depression, having been born in the first half of the 1920s to a mother who didn't want him, since she wasn't married, and shipped him off to his grandparents to be raised by them. He never liked his mother as a result, but adored his grandmother, as it was she and his grandfather who raised him.

My father grew up poor, often half-humorously telling me that until he grew up the only part of the chicken he ever saw was the gravy; stories were related about spending an entire day in a movie theater for ten cents, with a bag of overripe bananas picked up from the trash at a fruitstand for refreshment. His grandfather dressed him in clothing picked up from second-hand stores, and he told me that when he joined the Army Air Corps to go into World War 2, the best thing about being in the service was the food.

Dad ended up being a bombardier, with a lot of missions under his belt in the European theater of the war (more than was necessary to complete his obligation) and he was about to go to the Asian theater when the bombs were dropped and Japan surrendered.

He went home, met my mother, and lived a fairly frugal existence with their new daughter, Kathleen (my daughter is named for my sister, who is now deceased). My mom had a pretty interesting family, which I might talk about in a later post, but all I can say is, for many reasons, she was the best thing that ever happened to my father. She stuck with him through his moods, through spending money on things that he wanted but that they should have saved, and finally moved to a farm in Oregon with him and all of us kids because he decided he wanted to be a farmer.

I will say that growing up on the farm was the best thing that could have happened to a boy who was surrounded by my grandfather's books on natural history (my grandfather on my mother's side was famous in his own right, having been integral to helping the Japanese reseed the dead US west coast oyster beds in an attempt to revive the oyster industry there). When I wasn't working with animals, I was out catching them. We had a rock quarry where I could practice target shooting, and lots of snakes and lizards to catch. We had ponds where ducks would stop on their way to the game refuge adjacent to our land, and so we always had wild duck in the freezer, as well as quail and venison. It was a lonely way to grow up for most people, but my dad pretty much disliked everyone, and it suited him, so I suppose some of that tendency rubbed off on me.

My mother died a few years ago, and I was there holding her hand in the hospice when she went. Dad, who was always the big macho guy, pretty much went downhill after that, and my brother talked him into selling his home in California and moving to miserable weather in Laramie, Wyoming. Looking back on it, I think my father would have been better off staying in California at an assisted living place, but my brother, who is sort of a bigshot (or perhaps thinks he is, and makes sure everyone hears about it), talked him into leaving, and the rest is history.

My father was a one-of-a-kind guy. Hard to live with, but who gave me a few moral underpinnings that are valuable, mostly around the ideal of keeping one's word. He gave me a few other tendencies that I probably could have done without, such as holding grudges until they shovel dirt over me, but I'm working on that. He wasn't happy without mom, and he's probably better off now. And now all that's left of my immediate family is my brother and myself, and since my brother's too important for anyone to talk to, for all intents and purposes my family is my wife, my daughter, and me, which suits me fine.

I'll miss my father, but it also makes me look upon one's life a little more closely. All the things he did, all his experiences, all the things he collected through the years, and POOF, when you die all the material things mean nothing at all. It makes you realize that your life on earth probably means very little compared to what your life will be like after you pass on -- at least if you make the right choices. All I can say is: I hope my parents made the right choices.

Farewell, Dad.

Summer vacation's coming to an end for this old teacher

This picture is one of the reasons I live in Arizona -- a spring in Arizona's Huachuca Mountains in the southeastern part of the state:



But, as Diane in the old TV show Cheers used to say, I digress.

In a couple of short weeks I'll be back at school working on my room and getting my materials in shape. It's been a fun summer, although I had to forgo doing one of the things I had planned (real life intruded in the form of plumbing repairs and forced me to spend my money elsewhere). But that's OK -- there's always next year.

I found out one thing about my daughter: Katie will probably hate the Tower of Terror at Disney's California Adventure until the day she dies. I didn't think it was all that bad, but she did. My wife said Katie's lips were blue when we got off that thing. However, she's not a wimp!

We had our friends from England make their yearly visit to us for a couple of weeks, and we went to Arizona's Chiricahua Mountains to stay at a bed-and-breakfast there. Also became acquainted with the people who run the Southwestern Research Station in Cave Creek Canyon near Portal, AZ, and we'll probably be staying there next year. I knew the director in 1972 (Vince Roth, since deceased) and a number of other researchers who worked there on studies. Southeastern Arizona lends itself well to natural history studies, which is why the American Museum of Natural History bought this spot and made it their western outpost in 1955 -- lots of wildlife and being secluded makes for a perfect study area.

Just for fun I took Katie and Ian with me to road hunt for snakes outside of Portal. For those who aren't familiar with this pastime, it can be hours of boredom interspersed with an occasional discovery. What you do is this: find an old, well-established highway, hopefully not heavily-traveled, and the shoulders must not be graded (in other words you want the vegetation to come to the edge of the road; I'll explain why shortly). You choose a section of this road, hopefully a section that runs through country that you have previously scouted out in the daylight hours that looks promising for snakes. I forgot to mention: you drive back and forth on this section of road for as many hours as you can hold up. The purpose -- to find snakes on the prowl for food.

Snakes aren't any stupider than people when it comes to needing shelter from the sun. In the summer months it gets much too hot in the deserts for a hungry snake to be out in midday, so they alter their behavior and emerge after dark. As they're cruising looking for something tasty to eat (oh, heck, I'm being anthropomorphic here -- they're looking for a food item of the correct size that smells right), they may happen upon a road, and for snake hunters this is when having vegetation that comes up to the edge of the blacktop is crucial. If a snake reaches a wide gravel shoulder, it seems to realize that crossing it makes it conspicuous, and they won't cross that to get to the highway as often. If the snake pops out of the grass onto the highway, well, there it is.

Why would a snake be on a highway at all? Well, being ectothermic (cold-blooded is really a misnomer, since snakes wandering around in the desert may have warmer blood than we do -- the environment determines their blood temperature, which is what ectothermic means: outside heat) they like roads that are warmer than the air around them. If the highway has soaked up enough heat to be warmer, the snake will go onto the road, and stop to enjoy the temperature. They'll still cross highways which are colder than the air, but they have no reason to stop, which makes for lousy road hunting nights.

So, for good road hunting conditions you need:
1. Poorly traveled roads with vegetation coming to the road's edge
2. No moon or little moon (snakes are more conspicuous to predators on a brightly moonlit night, which is probably why you don't see as many in a full moon)
3. NO WIND. Windy nights are almost certain doom for snake hunting.

Anyhow, in England they don't do any such thing (being cold, plus having a lousy variety of snakes) so Ian found this interesting. It happens like this: after driving for about forty-five minutes, your eyes get blurry as you scan the road for snakes. Snakes show up white on the road, and are generally easy to spot if you're experienced, but even the most experienced snake hunter starts seeing things after driving for a while without result, which ends up in slamming on the brakes for banana-peel lizards and fanbelt snakes (which really don't even look right, because they aren't white at night in your headlights, but after a while you are just WILLING that object out there to be a snake, so there you are). This night was a good one, however, because from the start of the drive we found snakes up the wazoo -- but unfortunately almost all of them were Mojave rattlesnakes. Note that I say "unfortunately" not because they're dangerous, but because they're common. However, it was interesting for Ian to note that, no, rattlesnakes don't chase you, even when you're annoying them with a snake hook while you're trying to pitch them off the highway to keep them from being mowed down by a semi. All you ever hear around here are people who are terrified of being "chased" by rattlesnakes. A rattler's top crawling speed is around three miles per hour. A toddler does better than that. Even if they DID chase you, if they actually caught you, you probably would deserve to die. Or you might be dead already, as slowly as you ran away.

Katie, my seven-year-old sidekick (she knows the word "sidekick" as a result of watching Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom with me; in that movie he had a little Asian sidekick named Short Round; therefore she has decided to call herself Short Ford, which made me laugh uproariously when she first said that), got out of the truck, snake sacks and tools in hand in case I needed them, and got her first really good look at big rattlers in the wild. She followed my instructions not to get too close, and they made a lot of noise for her as I tossed them off the highway, which impressed her. I have a feeling she's going to be following in my footsteps in a few years, unless boys impress her more than snakes. If nothing else, teaching kids about things like this is GOOD for them. They learn that most of the scary stuff in movies is BS, and that gaining a healthy respect for wild creatures is far better than being terrified of them. Knowledge is power; an old over-used saying, but true nonetheless. I grew up being not much afraid of anything, because I learned how animals react in given situations and have always been careful to stay within those parameters. Oh, no animal is like a robot; they're all individuals. Even snakes. Every one can act SLIGHTLY differently, but I can tell you this: after about forty years of working with rattlers, mambas, bushmasters, Old World vipers, cobras, you name it, I've yet to be "chased" by a snake. Oh, I've had lots of them take swings at me, generally because I've annoyed them beyond what they think they need to accept. But they are unable to leap through the air, and typically can only strike about a third of their length. You learn to judge these things. Here's a Mojave (no, not Mojave "Green", just Mojave -- I don't know WHY people insist on that "Mojave Green" label. They aren't green!) Rattlesnake that we found that night:



Not a bad snake, and by the time I got it off the road it "sang" very well for Katie. I don't like pissing animals off, but given the alternative of ending up a pancake after an encounter with a car, I figure it's better off.

So, Tower of Terror notwithstanding, Katie is a pretty cool kid.

Anyhow, Ian went home with some stories to tell. We went up into the mountains at about 9000 feet at the base of a rockslide where northern twin-spotted rattlers live. Huge slide, and to get around on it to find snakes requires a lot from an old guy who normally lives at about 1000 feet above sea level. Here are some shots of good old Arizona for people who think that it's all desert:

An Arizona ridge-nosed rattlesnake (our state reptile) shot I took a few years ago in a different mountain range, but typical of what the ground cover looks like in high-elevation Arizona -- I'm posting this for my friend Rebecca:



Us having a picnic in a Douglas fir/ponderosa pine forest at about 9000 feet in the Chiricahua mountains:



My sidekick Katie telling me to go ahead up the rockslide, lol:



and a little higher-up view from the middle of the slide:



Not much desert to look at, is there?

Anyhow, between Disneyland, and our trip to the mountains (and to Roswell, NM, to visit the aliens) plus starting off the summer by taking my wife to a Fleetwood Mac concert (I never listened to them much, but I had to admit I was impressed by Lindsey Buckingham's guitar work) it's been fun. But now, it's back to work.

I had to take the Arizona state exam for teachers of history. Passed it, which is lucky, because I'll be teaching world history on top of earth science and biology this year. I'm also finishing up teaching requirements for ELL teaching (English Language Learners). So teachers' summers aren't all fun and games. But it's all been fun. And I've gotten a lot of toys this summer: new Toyota Tundra, an entire set of authentic Indiana Jones stuff to wear, from the whip to the hat and the jacket made in England by the people who made Harrison Ford's jacket. Plus this really cool guy:



Arnie now graces the top of my piano. A figure of Indiana Jones with the idol in his hand (from Raiders of the Lost Ark, the best of all the Indy movies) is on the other end, and Spiderman and the Green Goblin battle in the middle.

It's been a fun summer. Now to see if I can have a good school year. I hope!

P.S. Hey, I forgot one other important thing -- we went to the Smokey Bear Museum in Capitan, NM. Smokey was an ever-present part of the lives of my generation when I was a kid. He was a real bear, and was buried here when he died at the National Zoo. Katie is carrying on his message: "Remember -- only YOU can prevent forest fires!"

We've been abducted!

We were just innocently visiting Roswell, New Mexico, with our British friends who expressed a desire to see the site of the 1947 crash site, and I pooh-poohed it until we looked up and ... and I'll be damned! The captain of the saucer looks like Ron Paul!

Nah, we're OK. Just a fast note here, while I'm thinking about it. Good snake hunting near the Chiricahuas for a couple of nights, and even caught a nice little Arizona alligator lizard next to our cabin. A few days more in alien country, a visit to Carlsbad Caverns, and then back home for a week of resting up. Even if it has to be in Phoenix.

Now if I can just get out of this spacecraft...