Scorps and Smuggled Hootch

So there I was, three and a half sheets to the wind, standing so close to the middle of nowhere that we were in the same area code, in the dark, with it about to become much darker. I was holding a well and truly ticked off four-inch long scorpion in my right hand in the only way that a primate with opposable thumbs can hold one safely. And on top of everything else, I had to pee. Badly.

I can hear the questions now. “Was it poisonous?” All scorpions are poisonous-that’s how they work. Was it deadly? The rule of thumb is the smaller the animal, the more toxic the venom. This one was nearly the length of my hand, so by the rule of thumb, it probably wasn’t deadly to humans. There was only one way to run the experiment and I really didn’t want to play, having grown attached to my thumb.

“How did you get yourself into this predicament?” I was in eastern Sudan, north of the Tropic of Cancer, just south of true desert, on an AID-financed expedition to control desert locusts. The locusts were late that year, so the team went to Plan B, studying the other animals in the area and determining what alternatives to DDT were least harmful to them. We also collected specimens from this seldom visited part of the world for friends and acquaintances at the Smithsonian.

“No, how did you get yourself into a situation from a bad movie or a funny cartoon?” We had a generator; the only electricity for a hundred miles in any direction. We had a TV and a VCR. We had two tapes. Two really bad movies; they were the only ones the US embassy in Khartoum was willing to part with and I really don’t remember either one. Suffice it to say, we had watched them both dozens of times just to pass the time between sunset and 10 pm when the generator kicked off. We had pooled our carefully hoarded snacks-a bag of mostly crushed chips, a few dented granola bars, a couple of squares of half-melted chocolate, and declared a movie night (again). What made this night special, were the two bottles of smuggled Ethiopian gin supplied by Paul, our camp manager, an ex Foreign Legion paratrooper. He bought them from gun runners supplying AK-47s and grenade launchers to Eritrean rebels about 50 kilometers south. At night we could hear their trucks off in the distance, a faint glow of masked headlights reflecting off the sand from miles away. Paul had picked up a case of Asmara gin from a smuggler headed north for another load of munitions. He said it was purely medicinal and claimed that, as a chronic malaria sufferer, the only cure for an attack was to get as drunk as possible, as quick as possible, for as long as possible. I don’t know if it helped the malaria any but it helped him pass the time.

The movies tracked, the gin was passed around and around and around. We timed the party to break up with ten minutes to spare before lights out. Lights out was the real deal. When the generator shut down, the entire camp went black. You could, if you had enough time for your eyes to adjust, make it to the latrine by starlight. The shack was black and white stripped so as to stand out in the darkness.

With unsteady steps and sloshing bladder, I wove my way toward the aforementioned convenience when a movement in the shadows at my feet caught my eye. “Gerbil” I thought and made a barehanded grab. This is not as crazy as it may sound—biologists are always grabbing specimens. Nets are usually just an ornament. The great Charles Darwin himself, collecting beetles saw a rare specimen while holding a beetle in each hand. He popped the left hand beetle in his mouth and grabbed, securing all three.

Of course it helps to make a good identification of what ever it is you are snatching at. An entomologist friend once grabbed a red velvet ant. Red velvet ants are wingless wasps, covered in red and black striped fur. Anything red or orange is warning you not to mess with it. Discretion is called for if not demanded. Heed the warning and you both walk away unscathed. Ignore it at your peril. My friend grabbed anyway and was stung twice before he could register what he had. His hand swelled to catcher’s mitt proportions and he only made it through the night with liberal applications of Benadryl and scotch.

I grabbed at the gerbil with my right hand. Small mammals are easy to grab. The worst they can do is bite. OK, so you get a mouse bite. Big deal; that’s the worst it can do on its way to the big museum in the sky. As soon as my hand closed on it, the still thinking part of my brain fired off a message: “Not a gerbil”. The next message, delivered, postage due, was: “Something bad.” They say God looks after fools and drunks and that night I was both. Pure blind dumb luck had me holding the scorpion, for that’s what my brain finally decided it was, just inside the last segment of the tail. That last segment was the one with the nuclear warhead. The scorpion wiggled in my grasp like an enraged miniature lobster, pinching me with its claws. Part of my thinking processes were going: “What a cool animal” other, more rational, parts were going: “Now what? You can’t drop it or it will nail you as soon as you let go. There is no doctor within a hundred miles and no hospital until you get to civilization. Oh, and by the way, the lights are going out any minute.”

I half ran half staggered back to the tent where the TV and gin were. My brain, helpful as ever, was chanting a mantra: “Don’t pass out, don’t throw up. Don’t pass out, don’t throw up.” I found an empty pint jar and a half full bottle. Using my teeth, I unscrewed the cap and poured the gin into the jar. I eased the scorpion, head first, into the gin and held it until it quit moving. As the lights cut out, I capped the jar, took a swing from the bottle, and walked with exaggerated care in the dark back to my tent and flopped down on my cot, hoping I wouldn’t dream. I’m sure that somewhere, Darwin was laughing.

Acquired Tastes

Like single-malt Scotch or old Japanese samurai movies, winter beaches are an acquired taste. Gone are the miles-long traffic backups, the endless quest for a parking spot, and the crowds. I have walked beaches in February where I was the only human in sight, my footprints the only tracks in the sand. Even the smell changes—summer beaches smell of sun warmed creosote and cocoa butter, the winter beach just has a tang of salt.

Everything—color, shape, lighting—is different. The sand, lacking the sun’s summer heat to bake out the moisture, goes from that neutral beige favored by home decorators to a cold gray. Footprints last days, even weeks in the damp and pockets of frost and sea ice linger in the hollows. This would be a great time to build magnificent sand castles if you could keep any feeling in your fingers. The major change to the winter beach is the cold. A damp chill that penetrates the marrow of your bones, combined with the constant wind straight from the Pole, stings then numbs any exposed skin. You are at the lowest part of the continent and the cold runs downhill like water. Bundle up.


Thin winter light and sharp shadows give a painterly cast to the landscape, while the sea itself is a deeper, darker color. Waves, depending on the recent weather, either hiss up the slope in slides of foam and ice, or drop all at once like a collapsing wall. Surfers are few and far between. The beach shape turns from a long easy glide to the water’s edge into a double slope with a three-foot berm separating the upper beach from the lower. Skeletons of shipwrecks, keel and ribs poke out the sand on the upper beach. When the wind is right and nobody else is about to distract you, snatches of voices, just below hearing threshold, go through your brain. Old beach combers say certain beaches are haunted; maybe so.



Birding winter beaches has its points. While the number of familiar species is down, no pelicans, terns, or laughing gulls, the beach holds surprises. Razorbills, murres, and loons, birds of the Arctic, sport in the wave troughs, while rafts of snow geese newly arrived from Greenland bob just outside the breakers.

A few familiar birds eke out winter sustenance along the tide line. Herring gulls, some possibly remembering summer handouts, sidle up like hopeful beggars or stand wrapped in their feathers, one baleful eye following you. Sanderlings, birds who spent their summer in the high Arctic, are here all year, running like windup toys along the edge of the sea foam. A circumpolar species, they are probably the best traveled bird on the planet. Sanderlings spread out on winter beaches from Cape Cod to Tierra del Fuego on the Atlantic and from Korea to Australia on the Pacific.


I have been visiting winter beaches all my adult life. I always find something new, something different. A plethora of purple starfish along the top of the lower beach, cast up by last night’s high tide, gone the next day and replaced by an equal number of moon snail shells. Sometimes, purely by chance if you happen to be looking out to sea at the right time, the flukes of a sounding whale, probably a humpback. And once, a young harbor seal, with heart shaped nose and soulful puppy dog eyes, perched on a rock at the jetty. Fins tucked in, dozing in the watery light, waiting for the tide to turn and fish to catch.

Guilty Pleasures

Last night, Pat and Ariel sat me down to watch the DVD of Mamma Mia. This movie could just as well be titled Chick Flick for all of the singing, dancing, and utterly outrageous story, all tenuously held together by the music of ABBA. It is a remake of Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell, a 1968 tearjerker starring Gina Lollobrigida. Mamma Mia has a star-studded cast, great actors all, but unfortunately, not a singer amongst them. The sole exception is Christine Baranski, a veteran Broadway actress, who knows how to play to the balcony.

ABBA, as we all know, was a Swedish pop group who blended disco and pop to produce total schlock. Schlock sells and for a time, ABBA was the number one money-maker from Sweden, bringing in more money than Volvo.

Lord help me, I actually enjoyed the film. I don’t know if it was Meryl Streep singing her way through “Dancing Queen”, or the guy who played the dead pirate with barnacles on his face in Pirates of the Caribbean, or Colin Firth playing a totally befuddled second male lead (“where am I? and what is this terrible movie I’m in?”). Actually the best part was listening to Pierce Brosnan (“Bond, James Bond”) singing. At last, I have found someone who has a worse voice than I do! He not only misses the key, he misses the door, the building, and the whole damn zip code.

When the three males leads come on for the final big production number, it is worth sitting through the first couple of days of the film. No human male should have to wear what they had on. They forfeit all of their guy rights for the next 10 years for that one.

I guess I have company, Mamma Mia is the highest grossing movie musical in history. The National Movie Awards gave it Best Musical, with Streep winning Best Actress and Brosnan getting a nomination for Best Actor. The Golden Globes nominated it for Best Picture, and Best Actress. There is even talk of a sequel, apparently there are a lot of unused ABBA songs left to go.

I think I’ll skip the sequel, but at least I know I can sing better than James Bond.

The Wreaths of Old Town

Last Saturday we went to the Scottish Walk parade in Old Town, Alexandria. The Scottish Walk is an old local tradition, celebrating Alexandria’s Scots heritage. Pipe bands, politicians, Scottish clan societies, and hordes of Scottish dog breeds march over a round-about course for a dozen or so blocks. Our son, Alec, was a drummer for the City of Alexandria Pipes and Drums Band and we have been attending the Walk ever since.


An extra added treat is walking down the quieter streets and looking at the Christmas wreaths on the doors. Some are plain, others beautiful in their intricacy. The wreaths are entries in an informal contest, one that has been going on for over 35 years. Organized and judged by the Old Town Walled Garden Club, winners are announced in the Alexandria Gazette Packet newspaper. They receive a small prize (usually a gift certificate to a local restaurant) and bragging rights for the year.



The rules are simple: residents must decorate their own wreaths and use only natural materials (except ribbon), no lights, and no professional florists. Judges drive all 40 miles of Old Town's streets, coming to a consensus by the end of the day.



Door owners in Old Town take the "only natural materials (except ribbon)" rule to extremes. Wreaths run the gamut from plain pine and cedar with ribbon, to flowers, or seed pods, or whole oranges studded with cloves, or anything else from the fruit and vegetable bin.





Some wreaths are made from tropical fruit, complete with pineapples. Pineapples are a colonial symbol of welcome, dating from long sea voyages to the Indies. Upon return, the sea captain would display a pineapple to show he was home and receiving visitors.





There are wreaths made of ribbon, taking the "except ribbon" clause to the edge.


More than one wreath is made with feathers.


Wreaths with artichokes and other assorted veggies,


Wreaths made from tree bark,


One made from pears,


One made from seashells,


And even one made from red potatoes.


I don’t know who will take home the gift certificate, but if these photos are any example, the judges will be hard put to declare a winner. I guess the non-winners eat the tasty parts of their wreath.

Time Flies Like an Arrow; Face Flies Like Cows

When I was in grad school, I worked for the USDA as an integrated pest management field technician. My job consisted of traipsing out to various beef and dairy farms in Howard County, Maryland, to monitor face flies. Face flies are an imported livestock pest, originally from the Old World. They breed in cow dung and feed on cattles' nasal and eye secretions. While they don’t bite, they can become so annoying to the animal that milk production and weight gain suffer, causing monetary loss to the farmer.

In the late spring, I was part of a team setting up face fly monitoring stations. We would pull up to a farm and go into the pasture, first checking for bulls (dairy bulls are mean as snake spit). We set up tiny corrals of about 50 square feet, using three metal fence posts and barbed wire. Into each enclosure, we placed three fly traps made of plywood and painted white (Glidden’s semi-gloss exterior). The trap's shape, combined with the UV reflectance of the paint, presented the flies with the model of a bovine face; flies key in on angle and UV. We used a hand-held post driver (a short length of steel pipe plugged with concrete) and plenty of wire; enough to spiral around the enclosure three times. It was hard, dirty work and we averaged two farms a day, with two or more corrals per farm.

One day, we decided to go to McDonald’s for lunch. The team consisted of a PhD entomologist (later to become the chief entomologist of Guam), a PhD candidate, and an Master's candidate—me. Among the three of us, we totaled close to a half-century of education. We were tired, cold, and filthy from the work—we had discovered a dairy bull, a Holstein the size of a Cadillac and close to six feet tall at the shoulders—and had spent an eventful morning alternately working and running for our lives to get over the pasture fence.

Behind us in line were a father and his small son. “Daddy,” the kid asked, “why are those men so dirty?” I overheard the reply, sotto voce, “That’s why you need to work hard in school; otherwise you’ll wind up like them.”

White Cats for Obama

We were watching a rerun of Jon Stuart and the Daily Show the other night. Stuart was interviewing Barrak Obama, then just a candidate. When the camera isolated on Obama, Flint, our male white Maine coon cat, perked up his ears and trotted to the screen. He sat down in front of the tube and watched Obama, devoting his complete attention to the screen. When the camera cut back to Stuart, Flint blinked and turned away as if to leave. But Obama came back on and Flint was once again enraptured. He jumped up on the TV table and began pawing at the screen, nuzzling and purring loud enough to be heard from several feet away. As long as the President-elect was on TV, Flint was riveted. As soon as the interview ended, he jumped down and resumed his previous activities: washing and begging for food.

Huh.

Neither cat has ever shown any interest in television, even during the wildlife programs. I guess cats are natural born Democrats.

Woodstock Weekend

Real surfers don't say "Dude".
--Dana Brown, Step Into Liquid, 2003


Woodstock; August 15 to 18, 1969--3 days of peace and music somewhere in upstate New York. They say upwards of half a million people attended. People grooved to the music, exchanged genetic information, and imbibed various chemicals. Babies were born. Most of my friends vanished that weekend. My cousin--who had just turned 16-- borrowed his dad’s car “to go to a concert”, neglecting to say it was 400 miles up the Jersey Turnpike,--and didn’t come home for a week.

Me? I went surfing.

When I was a junior in high school, the film Endless Summer was released. I must have seen it eight or nine times. It was basically an old-time travelogue, following two California surfers around the world in “search of the perfect wave”. I was completely won over. I rented a surf board that summer and drove to Assateague Island to try my luck. It was a complete disaster. I was banged by the board, dumped every way imaginable and nearly drowned twice. I loved it. Once, in the shore break, I managed to stand up of a grand total of what must have been five seconds, but seemed like hours. It was ecstasy. I felt the ocean under my feet, felt the push and power of the wave; then the nose went under and I was gulping seawater and trying to figure out which way was up so I could find air and breathe. I was stoked.

The following summer, I bought a second or third hand board, a Hobie Sportflight, with a redwood stringer, ten feet long, weighing forty pounds, and as hard to turn as the Queen Mary. I brushed a pound of melted paraffin onto the deck for traction, scrounged a roof rack, and hit the beach every weekend. My summer job barely paid for gas and I camped out on the beach, fishing and foraging for clams in the bay behind Assateague for supper. It got to where sympathetic park rangers recognized me and would let me slide on the daily fees, directing me to out of the way camping areas where I could pitch my tattered pup tent.

I kept surfing the shore break, known to surfers as the “soup”. I got pretty good a paddling fast enough to catch a wave and stand up for a few brief seconds until the wave crashed down and the board grounded in the shallows; more than once, I ran down the length of the board to dry sand, having milked every inch out of a wave.

I began noticing other surfers, watched their style, and how they attacked the waves. Actually, most of them never went out, they mostly sat on the beach, worked on their tans, and drank beer. Their boards were untouched by wax and were just a lure for girls. The real surfers were out on the water, white triangles of zinc oxide on their noses, waiting for the next set to form. I seldom saw them with girls and the beer sat in coolers until it got dark. We were monks of the sea, sitting on the beach before dawn, waiting for enough light to go out, sitting on the beach in the late afternoon, waiting on the tide to turn. Watching the waves break with the concentration of chess players.

Woodstock weekend, mid-August. Assateague was breaking big (for Assateague); the soup was running at six feet plus, a wild and confused mass of foam and movement. I saw waves breaking left and right about a quarter-mile offshore. There is an offshore sand bar at Assateague, and when waves are big enough, they trip there first, reforming to break again, fulfilling their destiny on the beach.

I wanted to try outside, but couldn’t bring myself to paddle out that far; it looked about half-way to Spain. I was rubbing sand into the worn wax on my board to increase the traction, when a real surfer dropped his board on the beach next to me. Skin brown and leathery as an old saddle, hair bleached by hours under the sun, white zinc oxide on his nose. He asked to borrow some wax and noticed my beat up board, the dings covered with duct tape and filled with Bondo. “Hobie, huh,” he said “Well we’re not here to fuck around.” I nodded in agreement and kept sanding. “You going outside?" it wasn’t really a question. I nodded; the decision having been made for me. “Mind the rips” he said. “Rips?” “Yeah, rip currents; rip tides. If you get dumped in one, it’ll drown you if you don’t know how to handle it.” “Oh” I replied noncommittally. “Yeah, there’s one about thirty yards down the beach; see it?” I looked up and noticed a lane of confused water, brown with suspended sand going seaward until it spread out like a stalk of broccoli some ways off shore. “You can ride it out on your board; it’ll take you to the bar. Save on the paddling. Surf’s up; let’s go” I followed him down to the water, and pushed my board out. A few strokes past the soup and I felt the board begin to move off on its own. I was in the rip, brown water roiling all around me. The real surfer kept ahead of me, steering with short arm strokes until we reached the cut in the outside bar where the brown water bloomed out like a flower. “You straight or goofy?” he asked, meaning did I lead with my left foot (straight) or right (goofy foot).”Goofy”, I replied. “Take the right break, it’ll keep you facing the wave.” He headed left.

I had that part of the Atlantic all to myself, straddling the board, facing out to sea, the August sun warming my back. I watched the waves come in for some time, bobbing up and down on the board, trying not to think of what was sharing the water out on the bar with me. I’d seen aerial photos showing eight- and nine-foot brown and sandbar sharks lying like logs amid surf bathers at Ocean City, a couple of miles north. I resisted the impulse to pull my legs up out the water where they were dangling like bait. Browns and sandbars pup in the back bay, I told myself, they don’t eat when they pup. Yeah, my brain replied, but what if they’re done and need a quick energy boost; and what eats them?

I was saved from myself by a set of three big waves marching in fast. I let the first go, sinking into its trough from where I looked up at the second. They weren’t really breaking; just mounding up when they hit the shallow bar, steep shoulders trailing off from the peaks. I felt the board climb up the face of the second wave, pop over the crest, and fall with a hollow smack onto the trailing edge. I spun my feet in opposite circles to turn the board around, lay prone, and began to paddle as hard as I could on the face of the third and biggest wave. I felt the board pick up speed and suddenly I was moving with the wave, caught in the palm of the sea. I did a quick push-up and stood, making sure my feet were positioned on the back third, and took off. I had never made a standing up turn before, but somehow my feet knew what to do. I took the drop and cut left and the board ran with the wave, outside rail buried in the water, making a sound like tearing silk. Time seemed to stop. All of the falling off and snoots-full of water in the shore break came to fruition. I was surfing. The shoulder petered out and the board slowed. I dropped back down and let out a whoop you could have heard in Missouri. I paddled back to my take-off point and waited for the next set to come to me. I was in the zone. I must have spent four hours outside, taking on wave after wave. Lengthening shadows, an empty stomach, gripping thirst, and shaky legs finally made themselves known. Time to go in.

I took one final wave, as flawless a ride as you could ask for. When the shoulder faded, I began paddling toward the beach. The shore break had calmed to three-foot breaks, crashing down all at once, like a falling brick wall. Unwilling to call it a day, I paddled with fading energy to catch the last piddling wave of the day. Big mistake. I stood up, watched the nose of the board go under, catching the full weight of the Atlantic, and was catapulted up and off the front. I landed on my feet in two feet of water and turned around just in time to see the board chugging sideways into my left knee. I heard an internal crack and went down in a heap, the board passing over me and banging me on the top of my head. I struggled to my feet and hobbled after it. The board was dinged where it made contact with the bone—more duct tape work. I sat on the beach picking fiberglass splinters out my knee. A shadow fell over me; I looked up to see a blonde angel in a pink bikini. “You OK? You had some really good runs out there. Mike wants to know if you’d like a beer.” This said with a motion down the beach where the real surfer sat. He gave a casual wave and I limped down the beach, board under one arm. Just like a real surfer.