Geology...

Shaving mirror --- pointing at the ceiling. He adjusted it. For a moment it reflected a second bulldozer through the bathroom window. Properly adjusted, it reflected Arthur Dent's bristles. He shaved them off, washed, dried, and stomped off to the kitchen to find something pleasant to put in his mouth.

Kettle, plug, fridge, milk, coffee. Yawn.

The word bulldozer wandered through his mind for a moment in search of something to connect with.

The bulldozer outside the kitchen window was quite a big one. 

He stared at it.

``Yellow,'' he thought and stomped off back to his bedroom to get dressed.

                                                   - Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy


This week I caught myself doing something that I could not immediately explain.  Tuesday morning, on the drive to work, I was trying to go through my mental list of what I had to do at work, and the word "Geology" floated across my consciousness.  And then was gone.

For some reason, I took note of the fact, and stopped my mental perusal of my task list long enough to think about it.  It was a familiar word.  Not in the I-have-a-vocabulary-that-includes type of familiar.  More of a secret passage sort of word.  The kind of word that digs deep into memories of childhood challenges at the door to the clubhouse.  The familiarity of a pet name that your first love used to call you when whispering sweet nothings in your ear.

Where had that come from?  Why is 'Geology' showing up on my to-do list?

When I figured it out, I was amazed at what it said about my memory.

My sister and I have had a couple of interesting conversations about neural pathways.  She became interested in it, I suspect, because as an actress, she had to understand how her won brain worked to shove monologues and commercial lines and dialogue and soliloquies down specific rabbit holes, carefully nestled where she could access them when she wanted.

Meanwhile, my mother-in-law has been struggling with her short-term memory.  In an unexpected discovery, and I have found that she can detect lying with relative ease (her BS detector is on high alert when she is around me) and she actually remembers details better when she is processing them, rather than trying to remember them.

Case in point: On a recent trip, she asked me what my mom was up to.  I told her.  A short while later, she asked me again.  I gave her the same answer.

The third time she asked, I answered:

"You know, she has actually taken up mixed martial arts, and is competing quite well on the local level.  It is great cardio exercise, and she is doing some weight training besides.  The only difficulty is that she has to explain to her sunday school class where the cuts and bruises are from."

She looked at me, eyes narrowed.  "You are lying to me."

Twinkle in my eye, I agreed - yes, ma'am, I am lying - and told her what my mom was really doing.

AND SHE REMEMBERED IT.

I suspect that because she is processing the information, evaluating it for truth, and then associating it with a devious son-in-law, she has far better recall of that fact than she does when she is simply presented uncategorized data.

Back to my story.

When the word 'Geology' floated across my mind like a bulldozer looking for something to attach itself to, I stopped and looked at it.

My first year of college was the first time that I had to work to keep up with my classwork.  High school had passed without much of a need for any system.  But that first semester, I found myself making mental lists of the things that I had to complete for my classes.

My first class was Geology.

My list would start, Geology, I gotta read chapter four and prepare for the quiz.  English, review essay notes, Psychology, nothing to prepare....

...and so on.  But the first class of the semester was geology.  And it was always at the top of the to-do list.

The super cool part was that I realized that I have been using the exact same list since 1988.  I have not thrown away that piece of neural paper and grabbed another; I have simply added to the list and (maybe) crossed stuff out.

I always figured that my memory was taking the new list and putting it somewhere similar.  Going down the same neural pathway, because that is the way my brain processes to-do items.

But it is not.  It has not updated the list.  The list is not a bunch of Post-It notes in one room of my brain.  It is a scroll stashed on my desktop.  And every time I pick up the scroll, the word Geology is at the top of the scroll.

When I thought about it, I was pleased and amazed to realize that I had been saying 'Geology' under me breath every time I made a list.  The reason the word was so familiar was because I had been using it every time I made a list.

It was my memory, whispering sweet nothings in my ear.

Losing Fifteen Pounds

I lost fifteen pounds today.


My brave, strong, smart dachshund named Thibodeau was a fierce, loving, little guy who did everything in his life with a fiery passion.  And today was the last of his days under the sun.

Today I lost fifteen pounds of heart.  The fact that every potential attacker was a hundred times his size made no difference to my fierce defender.  He defended his home with an unbridled ferocity that made even the biggest of people back up.  Yes, some of it was that I did not train him, and a select few of you have marked up ankles where he did whatever damage he could do to defend Kathe (and once, when he thought I was being attacked, he made it all the way up to the calf of the wielder of a terrifying pool noodle).  If Thibodeau thought for one moment that his humans were under attack, he was relentless.

That enormous heart has left me today. And my heart went with him.

Today I lost fifteen pounds of wigglebutt.  The graceful line of his tail expressed the purest joy I have ever seen. When either of us came home, he charged the door, barking excitedly, enthusiastically, with unreserved joy at the sudden reunion.  And that tail, which looked for all the world like the crest on a Roman gladiator's helmet, would pirouette in circles - not just a back and forth motion, but a full arc of joy. He could no more hide that excitement than prevent the sun from coming up.

That tail will no longer greet me.  My heart is broken at the thought.

Fifteen pounds of love permeated that body.  Thib might not have made up with everyone immediately, but once he decided you were ok, (and that you were no threat to Mom), he loved with a passion. He snuggled.  He followed.  He hung out.  He'd offer licks, if they seemed appropriate, but his biggest gift was his need to be close to those he loved.  I have never had a dog that loved a lap quite so much, and he would burrow in to be as close as he could.

That space next to me on my chair is empty tonight.  Fifteen pounds lighter than it was yesterday.

He was fifteen pounds of eagerness to please.  Every once in a while, something would happen, and he would squeal when his tail got stepped on, or when he tripped up one of us who was not looking where we were going.  And invariably when he did, he would apologize with kisses, a wiggling apology for being in the way.  Even at the end, when he could not see and his eyes hurt him to the extreme, when Kathe was wiping his eyes and he would squeak, he jumped up to reassure her.  Licklicklicklick....

He was fifteen pounds of routine.  Every morning he would greet Kathe with the most enthusiastic tongue-licking that was possible, and was not satisfied until she laughed and put him down to eat.  He recognized the changes of Saturday and Sunday, and every other day he knew and loved having that play time between breakfast and work, and the time when mom would dry her hair to the music of his bark.  And best of all, when he was let out for that last time of the day, and he would charge out from the back door, hoping that the rabbit that often shared backyard space would be there.  And every time, he would almost catch him before he slipped through the bars.  Every single time.

He knew the routine, and he knew when it was broken, and was on guard every single time.

...because he was a solid 15 pounds of observation.  Kathe took greater and greater care to hide from him the bags when we were headed out the door. He did NOT like being left behind, and was keenly aware that when the bags came out, that meant that he and Lu were getting left SOMEwhere.  And wherever it was, it was NOT going to be fun.  To avoid his anxious stare, Kathe started packing the bag in the bedroom, but he quickly figured out what the closed door meant.  She changed bedrooms.  He recognized the signs.  She shifted it upstairs.  He sat at the foot of the stairs.  There was NO fooling this dog.

That keen sense of observation is stilled today. Fifteen pounds of brilliant dog, attached to a nose that sniffed us out.  And today, his body is no more.

That body failed him early, and often throughout his life. He suffered with bladder stones that made him miserable.  He had stomach ailments that rocked him pretty regularly.  And then, at the end, he had eyes that went blind when the tumors ate everything in their path.  Within three weeks, he went from fifteen pounds of healthy, happy, loving, lionhearted dog, to a lionhearted dog, in the dark. In pain. And only able to express his love between whimpers and apologetic kisses for worrying us.

Thibodeau, you are a good dog.  You join a few other good dogs in my heart, and I hope you guys have joy today.  Please, greet one another with no suspicion, and let some solid butt sniffing let you know that each one of you was well loved, and then you can play.

• Bean.
• Hippolyta.
• Doc.
• Pepe.
• Jassie.
• Jack.
• P.D. Rambler.  
• Captain.
• Marney.

These dogs have defined me, and I loved them all.  And Thib, I loved you.

I lost fifteen pounds today.  And I will miss that little dog for the rest of my life.

Power, Veterans' style

"Power is defined as seeing something that needs to be done, and doing something about it.  By that definition, Sonny is one of the most powerful men I have ever met."

Yesterday, I traveled to St. Louis to honor a friend of mine for his retirement, and this was how I introduced Dr. Sonny Trimble. It is true.  The guy is larger than life, and have incredible respect for the guy and his work.  A few of the things Sonny did:

- Led the excavations of 50,000 murdered Kurdish civilians, buried in a mass grave.  The effort
resulted in the conviction of Sadaam Hussein for genocide.  He testified at the trial.
- Led the team that reburied the remains for the Kennewick Man,
- Led efforts to locate and return remains of POWs from the Vietnam War,
- Renovated and re-placed the gates at the Arlington Cemetery,

- Led the excavations and reburial of the African Cemetery in New York, and
- Curated and shipped the remains of one of the T-Rexes that belong to the Corps of Engineers, to be displayed at the Smithsonian.

Sonny at Arlington.
Image stolen shamelessly from Wake Forest U Magazine

But the thing that Sonny is probably proudest of, and justifiably so, is the work he has done with the curation of artifacts that the Corps owns.

Sounds pretty boring.

It is not.

See, when Sonny came to the Corps, the archaeology that was done focused exclusively on getting the stuff surveyed/excavated, analyzed, labeled, and then put into a collection.  We really had NO idea what we had, or where it was.  Sonny initiated the project that went around the country and identified the locations of our collections, and made sure that we had good records of them.  Where necessary, the project was responsible for stabilizing, photographing, standardizing, and compiling all of the data related to the collections.  And, eventually, the project moved into consolidating those collections into regional repositories, where everything could be together.

Sonny could have hired archaeologists for that.  We work cheap, and we are always looking for steady work.

But this is where Sonny made it special.He decided to get a different group involved.  Sonny developed the Veterans Curation Program.

The VCP hires veterans returning from tours overseas, and works with them to translate the skills they have into marketable opportunities.  Someone who has served his country as a 14G might not know how to present those skills in a way that would parlay them into a civilian job afterwards.

But the VCP does.  The whole process of artifact curation is broken down into component parts of tasks and jobs that are replicable outside of the program.  Photography, database work, organization skills, office skills, project management skills, report writing skills.... basically building a resume while doing meaningful work in the Federal government.

The stories that were told about the program were heart rending.  Sonny's program has made a difference in thousands of people's lives.

After the presentation and the reception, I took my leave, and got on my flight back home.  As we landed in Jackson, Mississippi, the captain asked us to remain seated.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain speaking.  We have had the great honor on this flight to transport the remains of an American serviceman who was killed overseas.  Please remain in your seats until the soldier accompanying the remains has disembarked."

I have never experienced anything quite like that moment. It was the end of a long day for a lot of people on a full flight.  We were all tired and anxious to get home.

But everyone stopped and fell completely silent as a soldier in dress blues came from the very back of the plane, and exited without a word. Even after he left, we were reluctant to move.

We talk about supporting the troops.  We believe in patriotism and we believe in America.  And sometimes, there are people who go out of their way to make America a better place.  Some of them, like Sonny, find ways of making the place soldiers return to a better place by providing opportunities for experience.  Others, like the soldier accompanying the remains of the fallen brother, work to honor those who have made sacrifices.

Others give everything.

They all see things that need to be done.  And they do it.

Power.

I pray for the family of the returned soldier.  I pray for the soldier with the honor of doing the terrible duty of accompanying the remains, returning a box to a grieving family.

And I thank God for the work being done to help those who return, as they do the hard work of integrating into a society that sometimes struggles to find a place for returning warriors.

Thank you, Sonny.  I salute you.

Bomb Threat... and forgotten memories.

"Your vehicle insurance has expired, and we have tried to contact you multiple times.  This will be our third and final call to allow you to take advantage of our special offer," the recorded voice on my phone said to me.

"If you wish to speak to a customer service representative, press 1."

"1."

I hate these calls, and there is no reason that I should be receiving it on my government issued phone.  So Friday morning, I pressed "1" and snarled into the phone.  "You have called the US Federal Government, and I want to know why you are calling this phone."

A deeply accented male voice responded with a similar snarl.  "Who the f** are you?  What is YOUR name?"

"This is James Lawton with the US Army Corps of Engineers, and you have NO reason to call a government phone."

"Are you familiar with 9-11?  Osama bin Laden was one of us.  And the World Trade Center?  We did that.  Osama is my brother, and we are all coming for you.

"Your US Army is filled with sleeper cells, and we are going to rise up against you."

After quite a bit of vivid description of how I had engaged in fellatio with a number of folk, some of whom are related to me, the guy suggested some improbable physical acts, and then he left me with a statement.  "Tomorrow, we will be bombing a Marine Corps base in New Jersey."

And he hung up.

During the call, I walked out of my office into the hall, where a co-worker shushed me - there were meetings taking place in rooms all up and down the corridor.  But when she heard the tenor of the conversation, her eyes grew wide.

By the time the caller hung up, I was shaking, I was so mad.

Yeah, the call was not coming from a 601 number.

I talked it over, first with a couple of co-workers, and then with the security guy (who had done the exact same thing I did, and had an identical conversation, right down to the fellatio suggestion). He said that there was nothing in the message that identified it as a credible threat.  There was nothing specific mentioned, nothing that indicated that I had been chosen to communicate a genuine threat.  No declaration against projects of the Corps, no locations that meant anything to me.

The caller was, he explained, a member of a group in the Middle East who call up cell phones with the intent to harass.

All the same, all day Saturday, I was watching for something to happen in New Jersey.  It was no consolation that Saturday's attack happened in Pittsburgh, or that it was a white guy that did it.  All the same, I breathed a little easier when the day passed without 'my' incident happening.

There was a crazy thing, though.  For years, my sister Caroline and I have had recurring conversations about neural pathways, about how you form new memories and learn new things.  And specifically, how you can use existing neural pathways to access memories.

While I was relating the story to a co-worker on Friday, suddenly the hairs on my neck stood up.  I was suddenly reliving a memory of a previous call, received years ago, also made to my government cell phone.  The phone call in New Orleans had been almost exactly the same as the one Friday, except it closed with a non-credible threat against my wife rather than an unspecified military base.

My wife.

Once I remembered the incident, I remembered other pieces.  A memory of absolutely losing my mind.  I have a fragment of a memory of me screaming incoherently into the phone - in my office - about the actions that I was going to take to track the man down, to dismember his body, and to stomp individual pieces of his body to pieces of meat, indistinguishable from the dust with which his blood was going to mingle.  Another scrap of memory of spittle flying from my mouth as I turned purple with absolute rage.  A memory of trying to track down the source of the call, with no success.  (Cloning and spoofing cell phones was a pretty novel concept at that point.)

Before I started describing Friday's call, I HAD NO RECOLLECTION OF THE EARLIER CALL. My brain had tucked that particular bit of information down a disused neural pathway, and did not let me have access.  I have never understood how people could sublimate traumatic experiences, and what their brains would do to hide the memory of emotional and physical pain.  But my brain had done exactly that.  Only by relating Friday's experience did I get a chance to re-experience the fury and fear associated with a threat on my wife.

The threat against Kathe was no more credible than the threat against the Marine Base in Jersey.  And I knew that.  But it played on the same fear - the fear of an attack on something I hold dear.

Nobody can threaten me with things that I don't care about.  Threaten me with extra taxes on balut?  That might affect me once, if that.  Threaten to destroy old copies of Ranger Rick?  Huh.  I'm a little nostalgic on that one, but OK. 

But threaten my family, and the game changes entirely.

I hate the fact that this happens.  I hate that I lost control.  And I have no idea what we - as good people - are supposed to do to address the problems that result in such hate.

I wold love to think that this call is the modern equivalent of "Is your refrigerator running?  Well, you'd better run and catch it."  or "Do you have Prince Albert in a can?  Well, you better let him out!"

But it is not.  It is much deeper than that.  It is the result of extreme tribalism - where we humans (all of us!) break people into 'us' and 'them'.  And that dichotomy makes me sad.

I suspect that love is the only answer - loving my enemies, blessing them that curse me, doing good to them that hate me, and praying for them which despitefully use me. For if I love them which love me, what is my reward?  Everybody does that.

But it is a dilemma.  I also feel protective of my tribe.  My people. And my mind works overtime when I feel y'all are in danger.

Go love some people, y'all.  

Child-like

"I mean this as a compliment - I have to preface my comment that way, because some people would not take it as such - but you are very child-like in your approach to some things."

My co-worker was worried that I would take offense.  She need not have been concerned.

The context: I had picked up a few agates from a parking lot on the way to work.  I geek out about these stones, and when I find a pretty one, I like to share.  So I showed it to her, and in some way, I wanted an ooh.  Or an ahh.   I am pretty accustomed to people not being impressed with the same things that I am, but it doesn't seem to ever translate into a loss of enthusiasm.

I guess most people learn to tamper their outward displays of enthusiasm, but that has always been hard for me.   I tend to interrupt adults when they are talking if I am excited, I stop while I am walking and marvel at the amazing bug, and I can't pass by a gravel driveway without looking for fossils.  And jaspers.  And agates.  And geodes.

And then, when I find one, I want to show it off.

When I was four, I found a penny in a parking lot, and never stopped looking for more.  And by that, I mean I could not pass by the SAME parking lot, without looking for more.  I used to find bbs in the street (yes, bbs from a bb-gun; I collected them religiously).  I loved finding rare shells on the beach.  I found a stone in Belem (where rocks are not present) that was later identified by a geologist as obsidian (I am pretty sure it was not).  All my life I have been fascinated by what I find - what treasures appear at my feet.

The incident with me showing off the agate made my coworker stop for a moment when her four-year-old wanted to show her his newly-established prowess with tying his shoes.  Mama, WATCH. It slowed her down to appreciate the beauty in the items without number that she is handed every day - Mama, LOOK.

The past few weeks have been difficult in a lot of ways, and it is easy to get caught up in the importance of doing something.  Pushing, arguing, trying, making changes, getting things done.  And there is a time for spending all of your time and effort working your butt off for those things.

But there is also importance in being generous with your time.  Sometimes, that generosity takes the form of sitting with a new friend on his porch, drinking his coffee and eating a muffin, while talking about how times are different.  Sometimes, it looks much more like the silliness of a middle-aged man joining in with girls as they are doing double-dutch jump rope.   Other times, it is sitting quietly with a friend who needs someone to sit quietly with them.  And sometimes, it means putting the whole morning's schedule on hold while the four-year-old ties his shoes.

And every once in a while, generosity of spirit shows itself in the form of a co-worker who is willing to marvel at yet another rock.

Meeting the Artist

Many of my conversations with strangers start, So, what do you do?  Answer: I work at the Corps of Engineers downtown.  On Clay Street?  Answer: no, the one downtown.  Oh.

Meeting the artist.  

And then, invariably, the conversation peters out.

Last Saturday, I had a very different experience.

Kathe and I were sitting down for a nice Saturday lunch at the Pig & Pint, a lovely little beer and bbq shop on the outskirts of Jackson, and there was a guy was crouched down on the ground off to the side of the building, hitting something.  With something else.

"What do you think he is doing?" I asked Kathe. Kathe looked over.

With anyone else, my question would elicit an eye roll.  I was essentially asking if I could go and play with the stranger in the side lot. Kathe, however, has dealt with me for a LONG time.

"I don't know.  Why don't you go over and ask him?"

"OK."  If a look ever rubbed its hands together with excitement, this was it.

Pig & Pint. 

I went over.  The guy was intently hammering a piece of glass with a rock.  "How's it going?"  Nonchalance, at my finest.

"Oh, hey!"  He stood up and met me with a grin.  Held out a hand, with a piece of glass in it, formed into a crude arrowhead.  "I am learning how to make arrowheads.  There is a bunch of material here that is good to use - I prefer to use glass, because there is no way for it to be confused with the old artifacts."

I needed no further invitation. I grabbed a small piece of glass and grabbed a hammerstone, and started knapping, too.

There was a time in the distant past where I spent quite a bit of time making stone tools, and could bang out an acceptable point in a matter of minutes.  Those days are long gone. The simple mechanics of the work, however, are still somewhere in the physical memory, and I even recall some of the lectures I used to give on the process.

So suddenly I am just sitting around with a new friend, looking at pieces of slag (what in the world did this spot used to be, that there is glass slag everywhere?) and grinding platforms and talking about conchoidal fracture... and listening to Scott's story.

It made for a great way to end a lunch.

Forged aluminum mold, with plastic gear.

"I have lived outside for the past twelve years," his story began.  He went on to tell me, in between strikes of stone on glass, that he was an artist, and his work has been featured in the Arts Center of Mississippi in downtown Jackson.  He started talking about powering electronic devices with art pieces he created.  He talked about the process, how he started out by carving out a wooden mold for the melted plastic, but he found that the wood started to char and deform after a few uses.  The clay mold he hand built and pitfired and tested out was too fragile.  So he went online and figured out how to make a forge, and he made an aluminum mold for gears.

For the next half hour Scott and I talked story about found items, and about creating gears out of melted shopping bags, about carving molds out of wood and building aluminum forges out of a lighter and a battery-powered pocket fan, and flintknapping, and archaeology, and carving wood and painting...

Kathe eventually walked up, and I introduced her to Scott, who showed her the gear mold he had forged and shaped and filed and.... dang it, he MADE something with his hands.

I was so impressed.

Scott even mentioned meeting me on his FB page.
Shout Out!

He invited me to meet him on Facebook.  And so as soon as I got home, I did.  I also looked up to see if there were any stories about his art online. Yeah, OK, so I cyberstalked him a little.  But very little of my day-to-day interactions even remotely resemble the delicious five-minute conversation I had with Scott.

I friended him on Facebook.  Scott has been going through some rough stuff, and he tells it straight.  But his work is amazing, and I love his creative process.  He is not just going into a studio and cranking out pieces in a factory-like setting.  He learns, builds, tinkers; he tests hypotheses, tries and fails, and experiments with new techniques.

Daily elevator speeches between me and the people I interact with have to do with budgets and authorizations.  But I have friends who build stuff, who do stuff, who make music and art and grow things.

Three thousand years ago, the Preacher said, It is good for one to eat and to drink..., and to enjoy the good of all his labour (Ecclesiastes 5:18).

And yet I look around and see people who are unhappy with their labor, at least partly because they cannot see the good in the work that they do (and, as my friend LeeAnn pointed out, that sentence applies particularly to ME).  When the distance between your work and the good that you do is far removed, it is much harder to get a sense of satisfaction from it.  There is immediate satisfaction to be had in doing work with your hands.

His second projectile point.  Dang.

Granted, in the same vein, frustration from doing direct work is also more immediate, because when you have a setback, it is a personal setback. Learning to play the fiddle or the piano, and struggling.... there is no template to deal with that.  There is no shortcut.  My banjo playing has not improved one iota, partly because I get so frustrated with it, and without the template, I put the instrument down. My lack of understanding about what makes bees work is a personal struggle, and there is no shortcut to getting it right.

Some of the FB entries from Scott reflect similar frustrations.

But they are different from the frustrations of beings bound by process and Procrustean bed solutions.

Scott makes his own processes.  Scott makes his own solutions.  And his art, is, like his story, just so beautiful.

Unintended Selfie

A couple of weeks ago, I was in Montana on training for work - it was an ecosystem restoration class, where we learn the mechanisms and some of the science behind trying to build healthy ecosystem where human impacts have occurred. It was a great class, and showed a lot about how resilient systems can be when you give them a little help.  We saw areas that had been poisoned by mines, and areas that had been trapped by dams, where some effort from our projects had re-built a lovely place where dynamic natural processes had been restored.

It was also Montana.  And so, I stayed an extra day so that I could do some sightseeing.  Not really understanding the scope of what it would entail, I put Glacier on my to-do list.

From Missoula, it was a 3+ hour drive to Glacier National Park.  I started out early. and no sooner had I paid my entrance fee and started to drive through the park, than a startled elk ran in front of my car, turned around, and then ran off the way it had come.  My phone, of course, was sitting in the passenger seat, and there is no proof.  Y'all will just have to take my word for it.

For the next few hours, I drove through some of the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen, overlooking snow-capped peaks under enormous skies (Big Sky is a real thing - I don't understand it, but it is HUGE.)  There were bears, and deer, and spectacular waterfalls and terrifying drops adjacent to the road and snow packs and stramatolites and glacial moraines, and.... it was hard to focus on anything for trying to see it all.

Every flower needed to have a picture taken.  Every vista needed to be recorded, and the accompanying selfie taken.  I have never been much of a selfie person, but the giddiness of seeing such beauty really came through in the pics I took.  I stopped at every turn-off and parking spot along the road.  It took hours to get through the park, and every picture was more beautiful than the one before.

At the end of the drive, I decided to follow the advice of Chuck Willis, a friend of mine that I met in Peru on the breathless hike to Macchu Picchu.  (Yes, the scenery was spectacular, but that is not what I mean by breathless.)

He said to me: "Hike out to Iceberg Lake. Was my favorite hike there."

Now you have to understand this: Chuck is a beast.  He destroyed his ankle just a couple of weeks before we went to MP, and toughed it out by running until he had gotten back to an 8-minute mile.  I took his advice with trepidation, because the last hike I had gone on with him had nearly killed me.

The guidebook said this:

'...strenuous'.

Um.

Aw, what the heck.  I'll give it a try.

The hike was a ten-mile round trip.  The hike itself was not terribly difficult.  I had a couple of moments where I was a little short of breath (OK, truth be told, for about three hours I was keeping time with my heartbeat using Clemson's cheer at full 170bpm - 1-2-3-4-1-2-3-4-C-L-E-M-S-O-N....), but it was completely doable.  What was not doable was the phone.

You have 18% of your power remaining.

But I couldn't help myself.  I took pictures of flowers, of scenery, of waterfalls, viewsheds, and snow-pack.  And so, instead of having a phone with 18% power remaining, I joyfully continued to deplete it.  Pictures of rocks, pictures of animals, pictures of every flower that I came across.  Always on the lookout for bears (I had gotten a good pic of a bear earlier in the day, and part of the trail was closed because of bear activity in the area), and for any other large mammals that might show up to have their portrait made.  It was glorious beyond words.

With each stop, I would decide to pass on this picture, not taking a shot of that vista, of letting those flowers remain unphotographed.

And then out would come the phone, once again.  Irresistible forces at work.
I know, I know.  But the scenery is just so breathtaking.  How can I avoid taking pictures?  So I'll just take this one more, and then I'll turn off the phone and put it in my pocket.



You have 15% of your power remaining.



Oooh.  That is a pretty picture, too.  I'll take it.

Oh, man, I need that picture.

Wow.


Over and over again, I took pictures with a phone that had a rapidly depleting battery.  Beautiful pictures that almost captured the grandeur and the majesty of the place.

You have 10% of your power remaining.

As I was getting closer and closer to my goal, the images I took changed, as both the scenery and the flora did.  Things got a little rockier, the snowpack got more common, and the flowers got a little.... well, hardier.  But the breathtaking views, wow.  And still, every flower needed to be captured.  And since I was not able to tell if the picture was in focus, I just pointed it and mashed the button.  Then turned to the landscape and mashed the button.  Grab a selfie, mash the button.










So it was with a certain amount of pure self-deprecating laughter that I realized that I was not sure whether the most recent picture - of a lovely flower of a dazzling cornflower blue  - had been pointed at the flower.... or at me.  And what was worse, the low light setting meant I could not even review it until I had returned and plugged the phone in.

Such a lovely blue flower

Here is the kicker.  Of course, the phone's battery died before I got there.  Of course, I did not get my own pictures of Iceberg Lake (which was stunning).  And of course, I asked a stranger there to take my picture and send me the shots when she got back to a place with wifi. (She agreed, and then of course, it got hung up in her outbox for three weeks).

But then, what I did for the remainder of the trip was.... that I enjoyed the scenery for me.  I was not pulling out my phone for every few steps to record a vid to send back to my wife when I got back, nor a photo of a marmot, or to take a picture of anything to record it in perpetuity. I was making my memories.  For me.  

It also occurred to me at that point that the picture taking with the darkened screen is very much like what we are doing with the work I was there to study.  Ecosystem restoration is a tough business.  We are never certain what the outcome is going to be.  The stories from the teachers all week were loaded with tales of well-meant projects that did not fit with natural processes, and failed to do what they were supposed to do, or worse, made things worse for the residents.  Every success story was coupled with a cautionary tale.  

What we do is to take a picture without being able to see or focus.  We take our best shot, given the knowledge we possess, and we mash the button.  The result is sometimes a pretty picture, and other times we get a distorted picture of ourselves.  

It doesn't mean that we don't take the picture.  And like an old-fashioned film camera, sometimes we wait a long time to see the results of our work. Instead of having that immediate gratification of the selfie on site, we wait to see what develops.  Sometimes, it is beautiful and worth the wait.  Other times, we have to see if we can do it again, or make changes to the negative.

But what we can't do is not try.  Because this isn't just making memories for me.  It is making sure that the beauty I get to see is saved in perpetuity.  For all to see.

Thank you, Kristin Rode, for the pic of me at Iceberg Lake