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!"
