Rare Birds, the Cerebral Cortex

I saw the glass flowers in the Harvard Museum, but the rest is mostly a blur.  It was February, sometime in the late 1980s, and I was attending the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Boston that year.  The National Association of Science Writers, to which I belonged for many years, holds their annual meeting at the same time as the AAAS.  

It's a perfect symbiosis.  Science writers need scientists.  Disheveled scientists are hived together, striding around with briefcases and rumpled papers, standing by elevators, chattering like magpies about very odd topics.  If you're a scientist-watcher and a science-seminar buff, it's the the place to be.  These otherwise rare and seldom-seen birds may be sighted in fairly close proximity.  A parallel may be made with birds in the Chiricahua Mountains in southwestern Arizona, the only place in the United States where certain species may be found and added to one's list in a short time.  I did not keep a list of my AAAS sightings, but they have included Jonas Salk, Isaac Asimov, Shere Hite, and Leonard Nimoy (the latter two undoubtedly strays from another continent).  

NASW members attend press conferences every day and write stories about the scientific "news" presented.  The press conferences are an additional hiving together where, say, the five scientists in the world who are working on, for instance, the cuticle of the nematode, or the locomotory behavior of gerrid bugs in the open ocean (I am making this up just now; usually the topics are chosen for their appeal to the masses) sit shoulder-to-shoulder, looking a bit dazed.  

It is also the place where a scientist is asked to tell a roomful of ADD-afflicted journalists in five minutes, in layman's terms, the high points of his or her life's work.  At that time of year, the science-attentive back at home will note that newspaper and radio science stories are derived from AAAS presentations.  At the press conferences were the agitated newspaper and radio people, on the front row with microphones and recorders, filing every day.  They seemed to grab a bite at the hospitality suites.  The magazine writers were characterized by a more take-your-time leisurely demeanor.  They dressed better.  They could do lunch.  The university people were schmoozing shamelessly, trying to get attention for their institution's scientists' presentations.

This trip started all wrong.  I flew to Boston, where the slush was knee-deep.  I told the taxi driver where I was staying, the Holiday Inn, let's say.  I was driven somewhere, and dropped off.  The hotel did not have my reservation, but they graciously found a room for me.  I have trouble translating maps to the real world, and it takes a while for me to figure out where I am, if I ever do, and as I navigate new territory, I always feel as if I am listing.  Usually to the left.  I get dizzy.  The conference was some distance away, so every day I took public transportation into the conference center.  My impressions of Boston in February:  dirty slush and snow, youth with great mops of springy hair (where were the limp blonde tresses?), everyone reading books on the--was it a subway?, the smell of wet wool, dangling mufflers, fur coats of every likely species, lots of black and brown and other subdued colors.  John Updike has called Boston the "cerebral cortex of America."  Presumably I was traveling around with the many students associated with the many colleges and universities in the Boston area.  I could imagine the neurotransmitters released, the electrons of thought crackling.

As I began to talk with the other science writers at the conference, I asked where they were staying.  I realized I had been deposited at the wrong Holiday Inn.  The taxi-driver had not given me a choice, but had decided for me.  I was made painfully aware of my demeanor, which, maybe because of the listing to the left, always seems to lack authority.  

But the programs had begun, the days were full, and even if my other reservation had not been lost, it would have been too difficult to retrieve my suitcases and schlep myself to other lodgings.  So every day, the slush, the wet wool, the readers, the furs, going the distance.  My briefcase becoming heavier and heavier with the free papers I had picked up in the press room, and the fatal attraction of handouts from the exhibits: key chains, jar openers, pens, posters, candy, buttons (I *heart* science) and other doo-dads.

And I got sick.  I came down with the flu.  I developed a fever and red, runny eyes, and my cerebral cortex, already swimming with strange surroundings and navigational problems, felt as though it had been replaced with cotton batting.  My airplane ticket fare was based on a Saturday to Saturday or Sunday to Sunday, something like that, and I was getting per diem that I already had to supplement from my paycheck.  Changing my flight was impossible.  I could not go home.  I couldn't stay in my room.  I needed to make prudent use of the hospitality suites.  I went to the conference center and found corners to hide in and I absorbed what I could.  I apologize now if I exposed anyone.  I couldn't help it.  I have an idea those bugs were widespread, anyway.

One afternoon I took a bus tour to Harvard.  If Boston is the cerebral cortex of America, Harvard is its hypothalamus.  For a Westerner, whose great-grandfather (Dad's grandfather, very familiar to my father) founded the town I grew up in, Harvard and Boston seemed positively historical.

The Harvard Museum of Natural History is the repository for, among other things, Charles Darwin's sand dollar, George Washington's pheasants, and the only stuffed bird remaining from the Lewis and Clark expedition.  How exciting is that?

Sewanee Ladies Are Stories, One and All

Sometime in 2006 I was handed an uneven manuscript of correspondence, pages written by hand and on various typewriters, and newspaper clippings.   It represented an initial gathering of information about women who had been associated with Sewanee.  The manuscript was 25 years old.

 A group called the Sewanee Trust for Historic Preservation had formed a few years ago, stimulated in part by the University administration's unilateral decisions about historic buildings and structures.  Sewanee's late 1800s barn on Breakfield Road had once been in jeopardy, its timbers considered destined for a different use.  A Victorian house on University Avenue was deemed infested with termites and bids had been solicited for its removal.  Both structures still stand, however, because some people didn't want to lose them, and interceded on their behalf.  

Often, nostalgia is powerless.  I know the sinking feeling associated with landmark loss.  I've felt it with many things, including the "Old El," the two-story brick elementary school in Escalante, once photographed by Dorothea Lange, then imploded with explosives around 1970.  And with my great-grandfather's three-story brick house, which he specifically stated that he built as a monument to be remembered by.  It has been lost, melted away to a single story, with neglect and lack of imagination, or lack of champions.  A photograph and a drawing remain.  (It is doubly sad that my great-grandfather, who had seventeen children, employed the same bricklayer to build the school; in effect, two of his monuments were lost.) 

Not everything can be saved, the late historian Anita Goodstein once told me.  And that's true. We have to make room for the present.  But what is our obligation at present to save some of the past for the future?  And what parts of the past do we save?  And how do we do it, given the demands of the present, and the everyday?  

The mostly oldtimers who helped organize the Trust were repositories of "institutional memory."  They knew personally how some things used to be, and valued historical artifacts.  Here's my take on it:  They wanted a bit of control, a bit of respect, a bit of say.  They did not want to deal with an ambush from the rear.  They did not want to be called upon suddenly for brushfire action, which can require the excruciating and time-consuming task of contacting and  educating people one-by-one.  They wanted an organization in place to help guide decisions about Sewanee's historical artifacts, buildings and otherwise.  And the fact of an organization's  existence might give pause:  If an intruder ("decider"?) knows a watchdog is staked out, he may think twice.

But once an organization exists, it doesn't just sit inertly waiting for an issue to come up to have an opinion about.  It defines a wider purpose, and takes proactive stances.

So the new STHP held informational meetings, programs primarily about the history of buildings on the Domain of the University of the South, and they began to talk about what they might do: assist the University archivist, lead tours, endow plaques, sell flower bulbs and greeting cards, collect oral histories, support historical publications, produce a newsletter, and so on.  Members gravitated toward the tasks that interested them.

Writer and editor David Bowman and designer and publisher Latham Davis created a newsletter with articles about Sewanee's history.  It was a lovely publication.  David called it Keystone, and I was one of the contributors who provided copy.  My pieces were mostly biographical sketches.  David called us three the Keystone "Kops."  

At one of the Trust meetings, when the president had asked the membership about projects the organization might take on, Loulie Cocke, a genteel wisp of a Sewanee lady, rose from her seat in the back of the room, and suggested that the STHP finish the Sewanee Ladies project, which had been stalled for more than a couple of decades.

It was the first I had heard of it.  Meg Binnicker, the Trust president, tracked it down, Bowman read it, and eventually the manuscript made its way to me.  It originated with another historical organization, the Association for the Preservation of Tennessee Antiquities, or APTA, which had once had a Sewanee chapter.   The original concept of the ladies book seems to have been to create something akin to Moultrie Guerry's pompous old book, The Men Who Made Sewanee, in which the men are often wearing garb of some significance.  But there was really no clear parallel in the women's stories; the women were different, the stories were different, their contributions were different.  Their grandiosity often operated on a domestic or humanitarian level, and required more discernment.  

An initial committee of APTA, which included Loulie, the late Jeannette Avent, Betty Nick Chitty, and the late Arthur Ben Chitty, generated a list of significant Sewanee women and solicited biographical sketches of them, from family members, or from people who had known them, or perhaps from someone who had presented a biographical sketch at some meeting or other.  The women included on the list were all deceased.  The original concept did not include photographs; reproduction and printing of photos would have been too expensive at that time.  But contributors were encouraged to deposit photographs of the profiled women in the University archives.  

Mr. Chitty had passed on to his reward when the manuscript came to me, so I could only make some guesses.  Some of the sequencing of the sketches was alphabetical by last name.  However, from what I could determine, Mr. Chitty had a structural concept that fit the sketches into the history of Sewanee, which he divided into several periods, including a "Golden Age."  He had made a stab at that narrative, but did not finish it.  He did note that when women were admitted to the University, Sewanee was changed forever.  I have an idea that from his vantage point and orientation he did not see the trees for the forest.  His connecting narratives, drafts as they were, were not really about Sewanee's pre-coed women.  Not surprisingly, he was re-telling the history of Sewanee from a standard viewpoint.  He had, in the past, written a book titled Reconstruction at Sewanee and it informed his narrative.  He was employed by the University in alumni relations, the history of Sewanee was patriarchal, and the University educated only male students for about three-quarters of its history.  

At some point, the APTA chapter dissolved and the project was shelved.  The chapter's money was returned to the state organization, except a bit of money that was left with the University, for publication of the project at a later date; it seems to have disappeared into the general fund.   Mrs. Avent passed on as well.

And time passed.  Then along came the STHP archaeologists, who excavated these old pages.  At first reading, I found the cold manuscript an unwieldly hodge-podge and thought that nothing could be done with it.  I set it aside.  But sleeping on a problem can set the unconscious to work.  When Bowman encouraged to me look at it again, I saw some bright spots. A handful of sketches were well-developed, well-written, honest and colorful.  Some might be fleshed out with information that I could locate.  And some of the sketches were instructive in their own way about the historical period and culture in which the women lived their lives.  Sacrifices and frustrations were implicit.  Some sketches were only the frames of pictures:  about a woman's illustrious ancestors, about her husband, about her children.  Some said very little, except that she was a wonderful mother and loved her grandchildren.  But there were tantalizing tidbits as well, threads I could follow.  

I entered the list of women on a spreadsheet and began to sort it this way and that.  I had birth and death dates for some of them.  Some obviously important women were missing.  A couple of women didn't belong in the history of Sewanee.  When the list was fixed, I had about a hundred women.  (The book's index of names lists more than four hundred people.)  

Loulie filled in some blanks and helped point me to various sources.  I looked at cemetery records and tombstones to fill in dates.  I joined Ancestry.com and delved into census records, death certificates, and other records.  A third of the women were born before the Civil War, in places other than Sewanee.  Half were born between the end of the War and the turn of the century, and the remainder born after 1900.  

When I sorted the list by birth date, a structure suggested itself, coincident with a rough timeline, and the story of Sewanee was implicit.  There they were, emerging from the page, the wives of the founders, and the mistresses of the early boarding houses.  And it continued that way, the missionaries, the wives of the later faculty members and theologians, the writers, artists, the matrons of the residence halls, teachers of children and female students.  Donors throughout, angels of mercy of all levels who saw needs, big and small, and met them as they were able.

  The oldest woman, born in 1801, was Eliza Pannill Otey, long-suffering wife of the flamboyant first Bishop of Tennessee (I added her because I had written about her for Keystone, and a granddaughter had sent her picture).  The youngest woman, born in 1923, was Joan Balfour Payne Dicks, from her photograph a modern woman who would not seem out of place today.  She illustrated and wrote children's books, had a messy marriage, and committed suicide.  A panorama of women had emerged, and begged to be animated.

I am not a women's historian, but I am good at research and at jigsaw and crossword puzzles.  This project was a puzzle.  I fact-checked and filled in.  As I began to find the photographs, I discovered that they told their own story in evolving women's dress.

The project taught me a number of things about women's history, and the tracks we leave on the sands of time.  Two women whose lives were extremely well-documented were Sarah Barnwell Elliott and Charlotte Moffett Gailor.  Neither married.  Miss Elliot was a writer, Miss Gailor an artist who also wrote.  They were from prominent families, and left a paper trail that can be found in the University archives.  Miss Elliott has been the subject of a book, and someone should write a book about Miss Gailor.  

One woman, Susan Dabney Smedes, wrote an unusual and extremely valuable book, Memorials of a Southern Planter.  It is ostensibly about her father, Thomas Dabney's, life, but much is apparent about Mrs. Smedes as well.  She was widowed after only a few weeks, and did not remarry.  (My questions in general led to new acquaintances.  The search for Mrs. Smedes led to a correspondence with Rebecca Drake, a historian in Raymond, Mississippi, where in 1830 Thomas Dabney relocated his plantation from Virginia.  Becky and I were able to share enthusiasms and help each other with information.).  

A couple of women left short narratives of their lives for their grandchildren.  They are characterized by a certain humility, but these kinds of documents, especially if they contain details, names and dates, are extremely valuable. 

The photo search took me far and wide.  Photographs provided authenticity and interest, and with help I located images of ninety percent of the women, continuing to search even when the pickings had become slim indeed.  When I went to the archives, my initial search image was (suspicious-looking, possible Sewanee pillar) "woman."  I found some women's photos in the husbands' files.  Many photos were unidentified, and likely will remain so.  Significantly, a photo album kept by a matron, Miss Johnnie Tucker, who never married, was a valuable source of photos, as were the scrapbooks of the Sewanee Woman's Club, in which I found group photos.  If a woman's sketch indicated where she had attended college, I was able to contact archivists at other universities and ask them to look in yearbooks.

As I continued to puzzle out and paste in information (and sometimes I had to correct birthdates and change the woman's place in the lineup--I suspect some fibbing about ages), The picture of Sewanee's women became clearer.  However, many questions remain, among them  Which Sonia Dabney Thurmond (there were two) is the Thurmond Library named for?  And where (it must exist) is a photograph of Irene Ellerbee Hall (wife of Vice-Chancellor Billy Hall)?  I went around and around on this one, and quit when I reached a librarian who said, "You asked me that question three months ago."  I spent a lot of time on this book, filling in small details as best I could, and at the last I wrote a little song about the ladies.  

My "outsider" perspective, and the fact that I found no blood relatives in the gaggle of females, gave me a certain advantage in that I could, I hope, take a fresh look at the material.  The result is book standing to the side of, outside, the standard narrative, although these women were there all along in shadow.  Sewanee Ladies shines the spotlight on a half of the population that provided essential scaffolding and more, and much of historical and general interest can be read between the lines.

One of my old professors, E. Raymond Hall, told me that "there comes a time you have to go to press."  Finally it was time to finish up and move on to the next projects.  

One of them, I thought, should be writing a few of my memories, with names and dates, and labeling my photographs.  Lessons I learned from this project make me wish I had asked more questions (not just about names and dates, but about feelings and impressions, likes and dislikes) of my own mother and grandmother and aunts, and had recorded their answers.  Honesty, emotion and homely or unusual detail are sometimes in short supply in accounts of the generic "my life."

My great-great-grandfather, Charles Griffin, kept a journal in which he recounted the offices of authority he held in the Mormon church.  He also wrote about harassing the U.S. Army regiment led by Albert Sydney Johnston, and traveling here and there.  But he says little about his wife or the births of his children.   To my knowledge, his wife, Sarah Smith, did not keep a journal.  She was the daughter of Hyrum Smith, who with his brother, Joseph, was killed by a mob at a jail in Carthage, Illinois.  

 

 

Bats and the Comeback Bugs

Years ago, when I entered Arizona State University, I was hired in the Zoology Department as a work-study assistant to wildlife professor, Bob Ohmart.  Ohmart put me to work in one of the basement laboratories with another of his assistants, Phil Smith, producing flat "study mounts" for the myriad drawers that housed the wildlife teaching collection.  

My first subjects were birds from a giant chest freezer.  Many were waterfowl, "collected" (a zoological euphemism) by wildlife students who were also hunters.  (Phil was an avid duck hunter, and responsible for my single foray into cooking duck a l'orange.)  The freezer held a startling potpourri of frozen items, wrapped in plastic, brown paper, or newspaper, brought in by wildlife officers, students, roadkill aficionados, or other odd contributors.  Scribbles on the brown paper or little torn pieces of paper stuck into the bags noted where and when the frozen and often bloody item was collected.  (Not long after I began, we were the recipients of two whistling swans, which are protected species.  An excited hunter had called the Game and Fish Department to come see the two giant snow geese he had bagged.)

I put together a "skinning kit" in an old blue metal fishing tackle box.  A cross between a sewing kit and a carpenter's toolbox. it held sturdy needles, thread, twine, wire, scissors, scalpel, probes, forceps, and pliers.  Borax for sprinkling inside the skin to keep dermestid beetles away, excelsior or foam for stuffing.  A hair dryer for fluffing up feathers that had been washed or dipped in solvent.  Tags to tie on the crossed legs.  For the occasional "live mount," I could use shiny beads or shanked buttons to simulate eyes.  

I did my best.  I found this job more interesting than typing book reviews for Professor Collice Portnoff in the English Department, which I was also doing to make a little money.  When Ohmart picked up my first specimen, which had assumed a shape reminiscent of a racquetball racket, a grin slowly spread over his face.  He said, "You've created a new species:  The long-necked grebe."

Bird skins are stretchy.  

I improved.  In a year or so I had graduated to bats that I had helped collect in the field, usually using mist nets in which they were entangled.  We placed the mist nets near small ponds, which reflected light at night and attracted the insects upon which the bats fed.  One of the collecting sites was on the Spider Ranch, near Prescott, where Ohmart was inventorying birds and mammals.

Bats are mammals, warm-blooded and furry.  Because their teeth vary and are important in classification, bat skulls are removed (bird skulls are left in situ) and are kept, usually in a little lidded glass vial, alongside the stuffed or "mounted" study specimens to which they belong.  I loved looking at the specimens in the drawers, thinking about how they were like books in a reference library, with name, collection place, collection date.  A snapshot in time.

Bats are classified in the Order Chiroptera, which translates to "hand-wing."  Bats' fingerbones are greatly elongated, and the thin leathery webbing stretched between the finger bones creates the bat's wing.  Bats hold on with their feet and hang upside-down when they are sleeping or hibernating, usually in large groups.   

I noticed right away that some bats came with extras.  With forceps I pulled off what appeared to be translucent spiders with long pinkish legs.  I popped them into formalin and delivered them to the curator of the insect collection, where I learned that they were parasitic flies of the Family Strebliidae.  

 

Some bats looked like military officers, with little round horizontal-striped badges dangling from their chests.   I removed the badges and looked at them.  They were insects.  I could see the stripes of their abdominal segments because they did not have wings.  They were bedbugs.  Once you have seen and identified one bedbug, they are unmistakable.

I vaguely remembered that my mother had once mentioned bedbugs, and the horror of acquiring an infestation through a suitcase.  She said, "you can smell bedbugs."  I had never seen a bedbug nor smelled one.  My dad built our house before World War II, and apparently my mother's vigilance had kept them at bay.

Entomologist Howard Ensign Evans includes a lively section about bedbugs in his book, Life on a Little-Known Planet.  Apparently I lived in an anomalous historical era, a bedbug refractory period, because bedbugs have been around since time immemorial. I once met Evans, when he visited Arizona State.  Because I had found his book so odd, so hilarious, so off-the wall, so entertaining, I expected the books' author to be antic and colorful as well.  However, I found him unremarkable in person and I have no recollection of his appearance, except that he seemed a bit dour.  He was an author I preferred to commune with through his writings.

Bedbugs are bloodsucking ectoparasites that depend on a host, and humans and bats are the only mammals that host bedbugs.  When our ancestors lived in caves, they apparently acquired bedbugs from the bats that also occupied the caves.  When humans packed their bags and left the caves for more upscale homes, the bedbugs went, too.  Ectoparasites depend on hosts for their taxi service.  Crowding and sociality help them along.

Bedbugs were long present in the Mediterranean, and Evans writes that they probably traveled to England with the Roman Legions.   Samuel Pepys, another wild and crazy guy in his writings, reports on finding his bed "lousy," which made him "merry."  Bedbugs were common in the early days of the English colonies, but were apparently unknown to the Indians.  Bedbugs were more gift that Europeans gave to the New World.

Evans recounts providing the "drinks for a bedbug bacchanal" when he was a college student.  He was on a trip to Florida, and he says he didn't get much sleep, but that his cabin in Lake Worth provided enough bedbugs for years of use in his college classes.  Another entomologist, Robert Usinger, who wrote a long treatise on bedbugs, put his pedigreed bedbugs in vials and took them with him to conferences, where he strapped them onto his arm to feed them.  

 Bedbugs feed only on blood, and they're sneaky.  They feed at night, emerging from hiding places in cracks, under mattresses, or behind wallpaper.  They are not known to carry disease, but the site of their bites may become red and itchy.  Like other bloodsuckers, they inject anesthetic and anticoagulant to keep the host unaware and the blood flowing while they are feeding, and it may be the host's reaction to those substances that causes the itching.  Years ago we stayed one night at an old hotel in Buenos Aires after a long, long flight, and I noted the next day that I had sustained a number of bites on my shins and legs.  I did wonder briefly, but I was so tired I couldn't have roused no matter what was feeding on me.  

Bedbugs are notable in that they smell cloyingly sweet, a smell described as like "fresh raspberries," and that they engage in a kinky practice known as "traumatic insemination."  The male simply pokes a hole into the female's abdomen between segments when they mate, and the number of matings can be counted by the number of scars.  

Evans says the head of the U.S. Bureau of Entomology remarked in 1889 that he had occasionally met a person who had never seen a bedbug, but that such persons were rare.  Insecticides, hygiene, sanitation, and housekeeping practices have given us a couple of generations in the U.S. who have not seen bedbugs, but I've read several places, including in the Nashville Tennessean this week that the bugs are making a comeback.  

"Suitcases!" my mother would exclaim.

And indeed, travel was cited as a significant cause.  Also the ban on DDT.  But DDT was banned for good reason, and who wants to sleep in a bed dusted with DDT?  "You don't want to use a heavy-duty pesticide in a sleeping area," said the responsible Orkin man quoted in the article.  

The subhead of the article:  "Hotel industry says pests extremely rare."  

The Teacher Whose Students Would Not Go Away

I had been trying for what seemed like forever to get into the class, which had had a waiting list almost since it had begun.  A hundred and sixty students, from far and wide, were turned away each semester.  Finally, in 1980, I was one of the favored thirty-six or so admitted into Scientific Illustration, taught at the University of Arizona by Donald Bennett Sayner, in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Sayner, I quickly discovered, was like no other teacher I had had before.  He was like no teacher I have had since.  He resembled a character from a Dickens novel, W. C. Fields with a bolo tie, Charles Darwin with sandals.  When he smiled, his eyes looked to the side.  He willingly posed for us so we could practice our photography skills.

He was gentle, yet authoritative, organized in his disorganization, focused in the midst of chaos.  During his "lectures," which seemed more like a series of thoughtful asides, he passed around photographs, maps, bones, feathers, shells, sticks, plants, old cameras, film clips, calipers, templates, grids.  His voice was soft, but he clicked along with enthusiasm and a kind of suppressed glee.  Students murmured constantly throughout his presentations, but Sayner was not perturbed.  He seemed to regard this chorus of katydids as pleasant background.  

In his laboratory, the chorus continued, combined with movement.  Sayner was not confused; in a white lab coat with a magnifying glass dangling from his neck, he moved, too, among the cluttered tables and cabinets with meditative ease.  Sometimes he took a student's pen and made a stipple or two, or dipped a crow-quill pen into India ink and drew a little thick and thin line on a student's piece.  Sometimes he licked his little finger and made a deft dab.  His office was stacked neck-high with books and papers, the telephone's ring muffled in the bunker, but he could always locate something, or direct us:  "Right side of desk, third stack, about a foot down."  

We were to create two portfolios, in technical drawing and in photography, both as a reference for ourselves and a demonstration to others of what we could do.  After basic exercises, which included drafting a map of Baja California and treating it six ways from Sunday, we were free to follow our bliss--into archaeology, botany, entomology, geology, medicine, museum displays, advertising, and so on.  It was a beehive of activity, sometimes with a real beehive and real bees.  And who were all those strange people bustling around, unrolling drawings, making diazo slides, moving back and forth from the enlarger to the darkroom?  

"My students won't go away," Sayner said.  "The old students come back and keep the place going at night for the new students."  One of his assistants was a Yaqui Indian who wore thick glasses and played the harpsichord, and whose ancestor had published a Tucson Spanish-language newspaper, El Mosquito.  Amazing line drawings flowed from the end of his pen.  He designed his own concert tickets and publicity posters, printed them on a printing press in the corner of the room, removed the legs from his harpsichord, loaded it in his pickup truck, and went on tour.

In her short piece, "How to Be a Writer," Lorrie Moore notes that in college you notice that there are people who are dumber than you are and people who are smarter than you are, and that's pretty much how it will be your entire life.  Whereas I wasn't exactly erasing holes in my drawing paper, my skills were less than mediocre in comparison with those of fellow student Paul Mirocha.  Paul's illustration work was awesome, and I've watched it appear over the years on posters, book covers, and his own pop-up books.  A few years ago I opened the cover of Barbara Kingsolver's new book, Prodigal Summer, and saw Paul's moth drawings on the endpapers. 

Sayner--that's what everyone called him--did not have a college degree.  He was born in 1914 in Odebolt, Iowa, "the popcorn capital of the world."  His mother, an artist and illustrator, also managed hotels, and Sayner helped her with everything, including entertaining guests.  He came to Arizona to study anthropolgy, but after a little time at the University of Arizona and working on digs on the Apache Indian Reservation, he ran out of money.  It was the 1930s.  He and a friend began barnstorming airplanes, chopping out landing strips in the middle of nowhere.  On the Navajo Reservation, they drove around in a beat-up car playing "The Japanese Sandman" and telling the Indians where to come for an airplane ride.  

When barnstorming gave out, Sayner joined the Air Corps Reserve and went to Oklahoma to train as a reconnaissance pilot, then was called into the regular Air Force.  He spent most of WWII in Albuquerque, teaching B-29 engineers.   After the War he answered an ad for a statistician at the Scripps-Howard Institute of Oceanography.  He flunked the numbers test, but they hired him to survey and map.  At Scripps, he gathered information at sea, then came back and drafted reports on seasonal changes, currents, beach erosion, and submarine geology.  After seven years, he returned to the Southwest, where he worked on mineral surveys and drilling projects.

In 1956 he came back to UA, invited by Professors Chuck Lowe and Albert Meade of the Zoology department, to help students illustrate their scientific papers.  He began with his own equipment and a handful of students.

"Scientific illustrators don't decorate," Sayner said.  "They amplify the text.  They help the reader understand the writing.  They capture what a photographer's lens sometimes can't."

It was a practical effort, but Sayner clearly understood the passion behind representing nature, accounting for every feather, every petal, every scale.  "My students dearly love the plants and the snakes," he told a newspaper reporter in 1982.  "They have to love them, or they couldn't draw them."  He could see computers coming, but he was emphatic that human intuition and experience would always be important in illustration.

When I finished Sayner's year-long course, computer-aided design was still in its infancy, so with my newly acquired skill I hired out to illustrate scientific publications.  Irrigation projects from Senegal.  Cotton plant research.  Toxicology apparatus.  Insect behavior.  I drafted charts and maps by the dozens and dozens, expert with Mylar, Pounce, Zip-a-Tone, Rapidograph pens, K&E templates and proportional dividers.  I drew most of the distribution maps for Jim Brown and Art Gibson's book, Biogeography.  I went back to Sayner's lab when I had questions or problems.

When Sayner officially retired in 1985, he had trained more than 4000 illustrators (New York Times, June 16, 1991).  Many had gone on to distinguished and award-winning careers.  That year, former student Chris Kohler Smith (who illustrated my book, Senses and Sensibilities), helped organize "A Salute to Sayner," an alumni exhibit and party, in the UA Student Union Galleries.  Sayner's old students came from everywhere, with drawings, paintings, posters, photographs, sculptures, bronzes, textbooks, T-shirts, and more.  Sayner arrived at the opening in an antique car, decked out in vintage costume, and a great time was had by all. 

I had written a little piece about Sayner for the short-lived Gecko Echo newsletter, and he referred me his "biographer."  Sayner came to my wedding at the Arizona Inn in Tucson in 1990, and charmed my new husband.  "I see we have the same barber," he said to Ronn.  

Every year until his death in 2004 I received a handmade Christmas card from him and his wife, Lillian.  One was a map of Baja California.  Inside it read, "Baja, Humbug."      

The Curse and Blessing of the Frog

What biology teacher hasn't dwelt on frogs?  Slice 'em, dice 'em, pith 'em, flay 'em.  Stick pins in their cute little organs.  Like yon Cassius, I thought too much, and I know I began to look pained.  My students: "Why do we have to cut up a grasshopper?  When are we going to get to the frogs?"  A salesman:  "A bology teacher?  I never took bology, but I always thought it would be fun to bisect an ol' frog."  Me:  "Well..."

Snakes are forever safe from regular appearances in the basic course--every snake organ looks like every other snake organ, long and thin.  But frogs were born with a curse--God made little frog innards too Disneyesque, too damned easy to identify.   And frogs too innocent and innocuous.  I have my own theory about who started this bology/frog thing, but that's another story.

So, I began to say firmly:  Ahem, excuse me, but biology is the science of life.  We will look at live things.  As much as possible.  And we did.  We made Berlese funnels and collected soil critters from the flowerbeds outside the classroom.  I went to the bait shop, and we staged cricket contests, and created pecking orders.  We fed water bugs and looked at swimming behavior.  We dangled bits of carrots on strings in front of living toads to ascertain facts about feeding behavior.  We did something with live white rats.  I can't remember what, but I know we didn't kill them ("sacrifice" is the term), because I brought them home when the school year ended, and they died of old age in a cage in my garage.

While I yearned for the day when plastic models or computer dissection would give me and the frogs a break, there was the year of the frog shortage, when we had to save the "dissected" frogs for next year;  there were the African clawed frogs, touted as substitutes for the standard grass frogs; and there were emerging reports from around the world about frogs in trouble.  

There were also the frogs of literature.   In 1993, I went to a writers' conference in Charleston, and my antennae must have been up for amphibians.  Mary Oliver read a toad poem, and a couple of other poets followed suit, and I came home wondering about the genre in general.  I placed a tiny classified ad in Poets & Writers magazine, asking for poems or short prose about frogs and toads.  As an afterthought, I added "salamanders okay," because salamanders are in the same taxonomic group and I didn't want to slight them.

I don't know what I expected, but certainly not 400-plus responses, from Hawaii to England.  By then we had moved and I was no longer teaching, so I had time to sort through the papers in various ways.  The pieces fell into definite categories.  Warts.  Sound.  Metamorphosis.  Dissection.  The frog prince.  Jumping.  Chance encounters (flowerpot, toilet, etc.).  Rain/Roadkill.  Disappearance.  A few salamanders.  

I put together a manuscript, and began to reply to the contributors.  I tried to represent each category, and to represent a variety of poetic forms.

I wrote an introduction:  "Here...in rhyme and free verse and incisive prose, is a delicious sampling of what contemporary writers are saying about what amphibians have said to them...Here, at the interface of land and water, are human and amphibian serenades, shrill and bass, light and profound, joyous and mournful, tender and angry, gleeful and rappy."  I especially liked the joyous and the gleeful.

Agent Joan Brandt tried without success to find a commercial publisher for the collection.  Publishers didn't know what to make of it.  Well, neither did I.  But I knew it was important.  It was a paean to all those frogs who had given up their little organs for the cause of knowledge.  A salute to the Class Amphibia.  An apology to a frog (also the title of one of the poems included). 

Ken Morris created the cover and the "bashful" phrase.  Canadian illustrator Barry Flahey and others provided a few line drawings.  I published it myself.  Some of the contributors are well-known.  For one poet, this was his first publication.  This odd book is now ten years old, and odd things have happened with it.  Some of the poems came to be recited by an amphibian sculpture at the Detroit Zoo.  One has been reprinted in a government publication.  It has been distributed to herpetologists.   The book appears among listings of publications that address science and literature.  

Here is part of a poem by R. P. Lister.  It was first published in Punch, in 1948.

There is great beauty in the bog

Where muddy creatures play,

And I have brought my friend the frog

To point me out the way.

A Love Affair With a Banjo

 I've always been crazy about the banjo.  Its lack of pretension.  Its basicness.  A stick and a round thing and a few strings.  Apply two hands, and off we go.  The clear, crisp round notes sitting in the air, sitting in my ears like little gold balls.  The jangling cascades of confident notes, little choreographed bouncings.  Whoo-ee.

My science teacher was banjoist with the band that played for our high school dances, and one of my fellow teachers at the community college in Tucson played a mean banjo, even played at my last wedding, but somehow it never occurred to me until the second century of my life that I might play the banjo myself.  It was news to me, still is, that I might demystify this particular stringed instrument.

I bought a banjo on ebay, and a friend directed me to a terrific teacher, Jim Wood, who was kind enough to take me on.  I found that holding the instrument was tricky.  I tend to hang back sometimes; I don't really take charge if I don't catch on right away.  Displacement behavior sets in.  I spent a lot of time making and adjusting straps.  Making straps was easy.  I made a strap for every holiday.  Candy-cane straps were easy.  Shamrock straps were easy.  It was the simple bump-ditty that defeated me.

My neurons and muscles and brain don't train or respond as quickly as they once did.   I'm also basically erratic, and don't play every day.  I'm too easily distracted--with housework, meals, laundry, pets, friends, bills, sewing, exhaustion, sleeping, woolgathering, showering, brushing teeth, email, depression, elation, anything that makes up a life. My husband has noted many times that I don't prioritize.  He is a mathematician, and creates little algorithms for living.  Get out of bed, turn around, look.  If no one else is in bed, then make the bed.  If we get fresh lettuce, then throw the old lettuce into the compost bin.  If you use the kitchen, then leave it cleaner than you found it.

I never learned the Franklin Day Planner.  I am like the wood rat.  I see something, and I drop the thing I happen to be carrying to pick up the current thing that impinges on my retina.  I leave little piles of items around.  Also, things drop off my radar screen, disappear from consciousness, and too often it was my banjo playing.  Kind as my teacher is, I'd go to weekly lessons and humiliate myself.  At one lesson, he asked me to write why I want to play the banjo. At the next lesson, I handed in three single-spaced pages.  "How long did it take you to write this?" he asked.  It was much easier to write than to play.  I also showed him my array of straps.

I needed some catch-up time, a focus group.  So in February of 2007 I hied myself and my Gold Tone banjo over to Brasstown, North Carolina, to the John C. Campbell Folk School, where Mary Z. Cox of Tallahassee, Florida, was teaching a week-long course in intermediate banjo.  A wonderful teacher, a wonderful room, great people.  I have never met a banjo player I didn't like.  

Of about a dozen students in the class, I found I was the least intermediate.  Mary handed out songs in tab, and I realized it was sink or swim.  How could I drive back home?  I had just arrived.  I swam.  I learned to read tab, and I played along, although I heard many extra notes coming from others.  Some students had stuffed socks into their banjo heads to mute them.  I went back to my room for a sock.   Mary ordered the socks removed.  "I like to hear the voice of the banjo," she said.  For a week I heard the voice of the banjo, my banjo, and the voices of a roomful of banjos.  A glorious sound.  I absorbed the sound, and the philosophy crept in around the edges.

Mary brought in other banjoists to show us different banjos and different ways of tuning and playing.  Lo Gordon of Brevard, North Carolina, brought in some of the banjos he had made, and one of his dear inviting little unpretentious banjos whispered to me, "If you like me, then buy me."     

English professor Steve Harvey, author of Bound for Shady Grove (and banjoist with "Butternut Creek and Friends"), played and sang "Jimmy Crack Corn" and other tunes for us, and described his meditations on banjo.  

"Shady Grove" is one of the first tunes I learned on the banjo.  It is a simple, yet haunting, traditional Appalachian mountain song.   The E minor is sad and beautiful, and the eight measures loop around and around without ever becoming tiresome.  "Peaches in the summertime, apples in the fall.  If I can't have little Shady Grove, don't want anyone at all," ditty, bump-ditty, "Shady Grove, my little love, Shady Grove I say, Shady Grove, my little love, I'm am going away," ditty, bump-ditty...  

In his book of essays, Bound for Shady Grove, Steve describes making a banjo from scratch (an animal skin is necessary, as is the proper wood), the qualities of banjo music, the history and character of old-time Appalachian music, and much more.  

  

"Next to writing, the banjo is the hardest skill I have ever learned," Steve writes.  I underlined that. 

He says, "A banjo is more like a wonder of nature than a musical instrument, in the same league as panther, lightning bolt, and tornado.  Like a mountain, it has no will of its own and succumbs to no one.  Like a creek, it makes the same noise over and over and never repeats itself.  Like the wind, it changes what it finds...

"It asks ears to bear all that fingers can do, and when the fingers stop and the banjo is safely back in its case, what it has done rings on in the ears, the limping and thumping of its clawhammer beat nestling deep in the body and, in due time, becoming one with the lub-dub and whoosh of restless and ailing hearts."

I composed a little banjo song on the way home, the banjo still thumping in my heart.

 

Music of Harpsichords and Boxelder Bugs

I first met Minnesotan Bill Holm in the late 1980s.

It began with this slim volume, published by Milkweed Editions in 1985.  I was working as a research writer at Utah State University in Logan, and was vice-president and thus in charge of arranging programs for Bridgerland Audubon Society. My friend Diane Browning was also a writer, and active in Audubon and folk and chamber music groups.  She had opened a bookstore in a picturesque old house on First East.  She called her store A Book Store.  

One day I was browsing at A Book Store, and Diane handed me this slim yellow book.  Utah has its share of boxelder trees, and Utahns know boxelder bugs well.  Red and papery, they appeared in Logan in the spring, crawled around on the windowscreens in my office building--also an old house--and, although harmless, drove our secretary crazy.  So there was that.  

Diane and I put our heads together and read about Bill Holm.  He was an English teacher.  He not only wrote poems about insects we knew, but he lived in a rickety old house in Minneota (that's not a typo), with several thousand books, a couple of pianos, a harpsichord and a clavichord, which he played at odd hours of the night.   How interesting is that?  We looked at each other.   Might he be our entertainment for the annual Bridgerland Audubon banquet?

So Bill Holm came to Utah.  He told stories and recited poetry, and he demonstrated how hymns could be converted into ragtime piano tunes, and he enchanted the gathering of birdlovers. Bill is an imposing man of Icelandic descent, with reddish hair and a booming voice. People want to hug him.  He wanted to meet David Lee, the pig poet (later Utah's poet laureate), while he was in Utah, and we helped with that, and Bill and Dave became good friends.  Years later, when I was working on the Huntsville Festival of Books, both Bill and Dave came to Alabama and read their poems, and I wrote a newspaper article about them.

As I recall, the bug poems came about, Bill said, because his students were lamenting their lack of inspiration.  Nothing interesting ever happened to them in Minnesota.  They told him this more than once.  Exasperated, Bill replied, "you can write about ANYTHING!"  He pounded his fist on his desk.  At that instant, a boxelder bug happened to be walking across the desk.

  

Bill pointed.   "Write about that boxelder bug!"  Because Bill always did his own assignments, he wrote about boxelder bugs, too, and composed music for them to boot.  Boxelder Bug Meditations, which includes artwork, was the result.  It has inspired a play.

Bill has written and published other excellent books since then (http://www.billholm.com/), and I can recommend them all, but I always come back to this unusual book, which demonstrates the clarity and elegance and skew of his writing.  His introductory essay on boxelder bugs ends thusly:  "Whitman said: 'A mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.'  So is a boxelder bug."

Here is one of the poems:

THE BOXELDER BUG PRAYS

I want so little

For so little time,

A south window,

A wall to climb,

The smell of coffee,

A radio knob,

Nothing to eat,

Nothing to rob,

Not love, not power,

Not even a penny.

Forgive me only 

For being so many.