The Call You Don’t Want to Get

Remember my article on STD's? This is what it sounds like in real life, from Overheard in New York.

The caller is described as a "guy on cell, leaning casually against a fire hydrant":

Hey, so, I just got my test results back, and… uh… so I got herpes.
So… maybe you should get yourself tested. (pause) No, no, no. No. No!
Dammit, Jessica, listen, I… fuck. Sorry, Jennifer. No, I–no, I'm
sorry, I've just been making this call a lot today. (pause) Hello?

–Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn

The Eroticism of the Sierra Nevada Salamander

Having spent much of the last month in the mountains, forgive me for putting up a few "timeless" posts, as we used to say in the newspaper biz, instead of on what happened yesterday.

On my latest journey into the Southern Sierra, I took along a wonderful book called Sierra Nevada: The Naturalist's Companion. Being a biological nitwit, I'm not likely to retain many of the natural facts, but author Verna Johnston turns out to be a captivating storyteller, with a knack for provocative description, and I think I'll remember some of her stories.

For instance, read the following description of the reproductive act amongst the Sierra Nevada Salamander, Ensatina eschscholtzi platensis, and ask yourself — doesn't this sound kind of, um, sexy?

Solitary for the rest of the year, for a brief while during the spring breeding season these wide-eyed gray and orange-spotted amphibians travel in pairs and court. The ceremony begins with the male creeping to the side of the female, his five-inch-long body and tail carried close to the ground. As he approaches her head, he reduces his pace to very slow motion, noses her neck, then rubs her face and throat with his. If she responds by tilting her head upwards, he slides his body under the elevated head, keeping contact with her throat as he moves slowly past. He comes to a stop with his lower back under her chin and begins to massage her throat with a rotary movement of his hindquarters. If he has captured her interest, she leans her throat against his lower back and follows him as he creeps slowly forward, his back arched sharply upward, his tail trailing between her legs. This "tail walk" may go on for several hours over the forest floor.

Finally, in a spot of his choosing, the male stops, presses his vent against the substratum, and begins a lateral rocking on his rear legs. The female keeps time with counterswaying. When the male crawls onward, the spermatophore (mass of spermatozoa mixed with gelatin) that he has deposited stays behind. The pair tail-walks forward till the female squats above the capsule of sperm cells. She pulls it into her vent and inner cloacal chamber with her cloacal lips, the male meanwhile stroking her back with his tail…

Apparently eroticism among the animals is not a topic on which there is a lot of consensus or scientific research, although at least one Canadian researcher does give talks on animal orgasm.

In the Sierra, John Muir reserved some of his sharpest scorn for those who claimed that animals were biological machines, driven solely by instinct, and incapable of pleasure. Too bad he's not around to take questions on whether salamanders enjoy their sex life, but from the following quote, I have some idea what he might say…(from "Boyhood and Youth")…

Surely all God's people, however serious and savage, great or small, like to play. Whales and elephants, dancing, humming gnats, and invisibly small microbes — all are warm with divine radium and must have lots of fun…

A New Word for Disaster: Pyrocumulus

This century we as a culture have learned words for a lot of what might be called "new disasters" — climactic scenarios rarely if ever experienced on the planet in the past, such as Category Five, Sea Level Rise, and Arctic Amplification.

Well, here's another to add to the list: Pyrocumulus. Here's what the pyrocumulus cloud caused by the Station Fire behind Sierra Madre/Altadena looked like a couple of days ago, courtesy of jhapeman.

They say the cloud reached from the ground to 20,000 feet in the air…

Stationfirepyrocumulus

An Idyll in the Southern Sierra to a SoCal Hell

We're only talking about 100 miles and 10,000 feet, but my God, the shock I had, going from serenity at Muir Lake to the hell that is Lancaster/Paledale under the plume of the burning of thousands of acres of chaparral. 

Here's what I'm calling Muir Beach at the spectacular (and empty) Muir Lake:

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And here's Palmdale under the plume…yes, that's the sun that the camera is struggling to capture, in this bizarre and frightening lighting…

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Seems like every time I come back to SoCal from vacation, it's on fire…

As If Rejoicing in Strength

I'm headed back to the mountains (this time to the Southern Sierra). Feels appropriate to post some pics from our last trip, this one (courtesy of my friend Cary Odes) from atop Cloud's Rest in Yosemite National Park, looking southeast towards Mt. Clark and the Triple Peak fork. We had company…

IMG_3799 trim 

In the words of John Muir (from his unpublished journals)

A butterfly flew eight or ten times around the summit of the [Joaquin] Mountain on vigorous wing, as if rejoicing in strength. When it alighted on the warm granite near the glacier, it opened and shut its wings as if in a lowland flower garden.

California Drought, As Seen from Space

Via NASA's Terra satellite, which uses a MODIS Spectraradiometer to measure plant growth.

Centralvalleyndvia_tmo_2009193 

In the Central Valley, the drought is worst in the Westlands water district. Many in the area blame Congress for lack of water, and for the 70,000-80,000 farmworkers reported to be out of work.

Interestingly, NASA talks about this in a note that goes with the picture:

The Westlands, reports National Public Radio, is the United State’s
biggest irrigated region. Water pumped into the region from the Delta
via the San Luis Reservoir supports farms where much of the nation’s
fruit, nuts, and produce are grown. It was the last water district to
join the federal irrigation agreement, and therefore it is the first to
face restrictions during water shortages. Meanwhile, the Fresno
District, immediately east of Westlands, had far fewer bare or failing
fields.

According to the LA Times, Westlands just got $9.5 million in Federal stimulus money, a down payment on $260 million pledged by Dept of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

Squeaky wheel gets the grease?

The American Way to Find God

God has become a dirty word among many scientists and leftists, I'm sorry to say, because so many Christians use their interpretation of an old book to control their fears and blame others — immigrants, scientists, gay people — for the woes of the world.

Meanwhile the real possibility of a societal disaster this century caused by global warming seems impossible to face, perhaps because it's not human and can't be vilified.

But on national television, bless his heart, Ken Burns — touting his new documentary on the national parks on the David Letterman show — reminds us of one of this nation's most original and most successful ideas, which was rooted in God and the Bible. He said, speaking of how John Muir and other conservationists set out to save wild lands for development with Biblical rhetoric:

The first impulses [to save the national parks] were spiritual. This is the American impulse: That I can find God in these places in nature, better than in a dogmatic devotion in a cathedral. 

Burns, unsurprisingly, is super-articulate. (And Letterman, to his credit, gave him and the documentary countless props, unlike an earlier guest, movie star Mike Myers, whom Dave barely introduced, and whose new Tarantino film he all but ignored.) 

Burns also said that the national parks are "the Declaration of Independence applied to the landscape."

Fascinating idea. Check out the whole interview below, if you like your Ken Burns straight up.