The Aye-aye (Daubentonia madagascariensis) is a lemur, a strepsirrhine primate native to Madagascar that combines rodent-like teeth with a long, thin middle finger to fill the same ecological niche as a woodpecker. It is the world’s largest nocturnal primate, and is characterized by its unusual method of finding food; it taps on trees to find grubs, then gnaws holes in the wood and inserts its elongated middle finger to pull the grubs out. From an ecological point of view the Aye-aye fills the niche of a woodpecker as it is capable of penetrating wood to extract the invertebrates within.  (Wikipedia, accessed July 16, 2010)

On the island of Jersey, in the English Channel, I met an aye-aye. It was in a dark enclosure; you had to walk through an airlock of sorts, or more accurately a lightlock, a bit like the entrance to a photographic darkroom. The zookeepers had shifted the circadian rhythm of the aye-aye, the world’s largest nocturnal primate, so that it would be awake while visitors were present during the day. No one goes to a zoo to see a sleeping aye-aye, obviously. The zoo (they didn’t want to call it a zoo, you understand) was the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust’s Wildlife Park, founded in 1959 as the Jersey Zoo. It contained the private collection of a gentleman called Gerald Durrell (pronounced like “squirrel”), famed author of “My Family and Other Animals,” which chronicles a portion of Mr. Durrell’s fascinating and privileged childhood, spent on the Greek island of Corfu with an array of odd characters including his brother Lawrence Durrell, a literary giant in his own right.

My host on the island of Jersey was one Lee Durrell, second wife and widow of Mr. Durrell, a primatologist specializing in lemurs who studied at Duke University, North Carolina. She had taken on an inflected British accent during her time overseas, and offered me tea from an electric teakettle in a massive living room whose circumference was outlined by bookshelves full of translated editions of Gerald’s books and artwork from all over the world. He was, above all, a collector; he began his professional life by organizing expeditions to far-flung locales in search of specimens for zoos. His most prized collection was that of the animals housed in the zoo at which I was a guest, making me a brief addition to that collection, if we extend the descriptor. I spent two nights in a mansion turned dormitory for the International Training Centre, in a room thoughtful enough to contain a built-in shelving unit perfect for books, magnifying glasses, binoculars, and found objects.

At the close of my interview with Ms. Durrell, she displayed a hand-carved wooden ark which had been a gift from her late husband. Approximately the size of an old tabletop vacuum-tube radio, it was immaculately detailed, featuring a beautiful array of carefully painted animals, including a couple of lemurs not quite to scale (lemurs had brought the two together) and a small man and woman modeled after the Durrells. Gerald had an obsession with the Noah’s Ark metaphor, titling several of his books after it: his first, The Overloaded Ark, and later The Stationary Ark, Ark on the Move, The New Noah, The Ark’s Anniversary. Lee even got into the act, titling her book on conservation, “The State of the Ark.” The difficulty with the Ark metaphor, of course, is when the Ark stops being a time capsule, a tool for the preservation of species, and starts to become a museum, or, worse, a collection of artifacts forever hidden from the world which begat them. Living artifacts, of course, but if the ostensible purpose of the Jersey Zoo is to allow endangered animals a chance to breed in peace, then what happens when said animals bear no offspring? Expensive foreign jewels on display on an island described by my cab driver as the sort of place where, “People own Lamborghinis but can’t drive them over 60 kph because none of the roads on the island are long enough.” The sort of place where a global elite would choose to station their fourth, or possibly fifth, vacation house. Purposefully rustic yet entirely comfortable houses bordering old orchards and sea-cliffs and Jersey cattle ranches, where everyone agrees to be terribly agreeable because very little is found wanting.

To be fair, Mr. Durrell wanted to save the world, and he inspired legions of people to take up the cause. He was afraid the planet’s exotic animals would become extinct and believed that they needed to be rescued. He developed comprehensive captive breeding programs, studying in detail the conditions required for each species to feel comfortable enough in captivity to get it on. It was the ecological philosophy of his time, and it was revolutionary. Durrell invented the “modern” zoo, transformed the old menagerie from a place where beautiful birds and big cats were left to wither in small metal boxes into an oasis of life, where expanses of grass and custom-built forests acted as surrogate habitats. It was the first zoo where a visitor might go and have to actually look for the animals. He built enclosures that were made for animals, not people, and he was able to breed several species successfully and reintroduce them into the wild. As modern environmentalism took hold, the captive breeding philosophy was practically abandoned in favor of what would now be described as a holistic approach toward at-risk species, beginning with a long, hard look at habitat destruction and extending into relationships with other animals, plants, food sources, and other, as-yet-unknown aspects of their ecosystems. What we all realized too late was that you can’t reintroduce a dying species back to a dying forest.

I learned at least two important lessons on the island of Jersey: that the lives of the wealthy appear to be completely different from my own, and that the world’s doors are thrown open if you claim to be doing research for a book. Whether I end up actually writing a book on the childhood experiences of naturalists is immaterial; merely walking down that path enabled me to see other paths, previously invisible. It led me to a forgotten corner of the University library, where I discovered Jean-Henri Fabre and his poetic descriptions of praying mantids. It led me to E.O. Wilson, and Haeckel, and Charley Harper. If I trace the path back far enough, it might take me to a beautiful book bequeathed to me by my first mentor teacher Mrs. Fairlee, as she was cleaning out her classroom library before retiring. The Amateur Naturalist, written by Lee and Gerald Durrell, which is nothing if not the backstage pass to an unrestricted curiosity about the living things all around us. Including, but not limited to, an odd little big-eyed nocturnal primate with a very long middle finger called an aye-aye.

Image from http://www.dailyartisan.com

I write about him here, thousands of miles away, in a posh cafe run by a lovely young couple. Art hangs on the walls, and trinkets of a bygone era — glass jars, old shells, moldering butterflies. My smartphone beeps, informing me that the president of Chile is now estimating 708 dead so far from yesterday’s earthquake. We have become so expert at collecting; will we remember to remember?

absolute timing
addressing causative factors
anaesthetic revelation
autumn squash
behold yourself
belief environment
biloha extract
blindsight subjects
broccoli rabe
cerebral vascular insufficiency
cham dancing
chasteberry extract
childlike people
chronic candidiasis
chronic hives
cimicifuga extract
classic quality
cometary fragments
commercial mechanic
computer presence
conscious robot
control food allergies
crimson salamander
crude polypeptide fraction
debating courtyard
deflection technology

diluted vegetable juices
discriminative states
dissociated learning
eight medicine buddhas
electrochemical happenings
emotional mind
epistemic hunger
extra string
fatherly conscience
filet beans
first spacecraft
flaxseed oil supplementation
formal geometry
formal scientific method
fresh garlic preparations
fuchsia hedge
garlic fragrance
ginkgo flavonglycosides
government guesthouse
gravitational tides
great demotions
gumption trap
heterophenomenological world
huge thangka
human missions
hysterically blind people
imagined cow
industrial tourism
inner kora
innocent student
intervening motion
inverted qualia
kilometre marker
kora path
kundalini shakti
limbic regulation
limbic resonance
lipotropic formulas
low immune function
magic drawing
mani lhakhang
mani wall
market shoppers
marvelous old queen
mattress phenomenon
medical materialism
meditation cave
moderately optimistic score
monastery guesthouse
mother structures
narrative gravity
negative coping patterns
neocortical brain
neuronal adequacy
olive trunks
other planetary systems
pandemonium model
paradoxical logic
phenomenal space
phenomenological items
pilgrim bus
pinkish glowing ring
planetary society
prayer pole
preverbal message
private telecom booths
prostration point
protector chapel
psychopathic temperament
pure polypeptides
rational faith
reactive dispositions
recurrent canker sores
refrigerator crisper
religious affections
reptilian brain
romantic quality
rotary diversified diet
ruined dzong
samba school
scaling heaven
scarlet penstemon
seasoned oil
shelling beans
sky burial site
spacefaring nations
spatial referral
spiritual judgment
subjective sequence
subliminal region
substantive field
tandem exchange
trekking routes
underlying form
user illusion
value rigidity
virtus dormitiva
volatile oil preparations
white chörten
zhongguo yinhang

There’s a kind, sweet woman in Austin named Katsumi, and she knows her stuff. I missed the bulk of her explanation of EM, but the 10cm notebook managed to capture these two intriguing words, vaguely Engrishy and ripe for googling. (With quotes, please…)

So, I’m not usually one to review/promote products, and it really made me cringe to put that (TM) up there, but this one just hits so many of my cultural/biological/ecological g-spots that I simply couldn’t help it.

In brief, you’ve got a guy, Dr. Teruo Higa from Japan, who somehow magically realized that bacterias and fungi and other tiny things are really good for, well, everything. So he gathers a bunch of them together, sticks ‘em in a bottle, and sells the mix as EM-1. People use it on stuff and are amazed to find that cool things happen. Snake oil? Well, yeah, if snake oil had live cultures of lactobacteria in it and, you know, actually had some scientific basis for working.

Let’s break it down. Three major groups:
lactic acids bacteria: Converts sugars into lactic acid via fermentation. Used in food preservation. Inhibits growth of pathogens by lowering pH.

yeast: Converts sugars into alcohol (see also Rogue Ales) or carbon dioxide to make bread rise.

phototrophic bacteria: Use energy from the sun (photosynthesis) to break down a variety of substances, most notably converting carbon dioxide into oxygen. In Dr. Higa’s brew, these little guys keep the other kiddos (above) alive.

The idea seems to be that the application of a bunch of “good” living microorganisms to unhealthy soil will crowd out the “bad” microorganisms and kick start the activity of the “good” local flora. Sounds like colonialism to me, but I’m no microbiologist. I am a big fan of all things fermented, though, so stay tuned for my post on kimchi.

Photo of a plush Saccharomyces cerevisiae from here, used without permission but since I’m basically helping them with their viral (ahem) marketing campaign, I figure they’ll be cool with it.

Today on my walk home from a temp job at a trade show for Oregon nurseries and plant growers, I passed the following businesses: an unmarked bar that serves beer and cheese fondue, a hippo-themed hardware store full of old timey doorknobs, an art supply store, a museum of velvet paintings, the best music venue in town, a Greek deli, the offices of a guy with an aircrane business, a drum shoppe, and a local restaurant which purportedly has the best buffalo wings in town. While I was at the trade show, I spoke to a man who works for a company that manufactures waterproof notebooks which (if you use a pencil or a spacepen) you can write on (it?) underwater. I considered making notes in my sample waterproof notebook about the places I passed, but it actually wasn’t raining so I was afraid it would be a little pompous. There was a man riding a bicycle while wearing a sort of fedora who kept stopping at telephone poles to staple band adverts to them, and his ride-and-stop programme meant that he and I were going almost exactly the same speed down the sidewalk. It was like being followed by a feline and when you look back to see if she is still behind you, she looks away as though she doesn’t want to get caught in the act. My other souvenir from the trade show was a directory which lists the Latin names of plants and who in the area has them up for sale. It tells me, for example, that if I would like to procure a specimen of Aesculus hippocastanum var. “Baumannii,” then I will need to pay a visit to the J. Frank Schmidt & Son Company of Boring, Oregon. Yes, there is a town in Oregon called Boring. It may be the only place in it that is. I am pretty sure I made the registration badges for Mr. Schmidt and his son, and maybe his son’s sons. The nursery business is a family business, and that makes me happy. In general I think that capitalism sucks ass bigtime, but there is something very comforting about families called Miller or Cooper or Smith who make flour or barrels or horseshoes.

Yesterday (after trying to remind myself about the fundamentals of Ohm’s Law and the analogy between electricity and water pressure) I went to this guy Greg’s block party where there was a man dressed up in a tree costume ruling the top square in foursquare, and I played ping-pong in the middle of 48th Avenue with a 10-year-old while another guy with an amp on the back of his tricycle rode around playing guitar. At the end of the street is Belmont Station, a beer store and tasting room that could more appropriately be described as a huge beer museum where you can drink the artifacts, where Kelly (Jen’s friend, Damon’s ex, and the cornerstone of my fortunate social situation) and I went after having Thai food at the place nearby where the owner is known for giving jewelry and other swag away to his customers for no apparent reason. Greg is Portland’s bike safety guy and has a really classy backyard, complete with full-sized teepee (with interior fire pit), and two of the block-party’s beerkegs were donated by a wedding party who had leftovers and happened to see the street closed off. After riding around town in a 9-person bike gang, sampling some Chartreuse at a low-key birthday party in the northeast, having a quick game of cornhole, adorning ourselves with some Christmas garlands left on a curb for all takers, playing smack-the-stopsigns with a giant plastic candycane, and breaking at Voodoo for some bacon-maple doughnuts, we went back to (Damon’s girlfriend) Carolyn’s shared Victorian-style house for a makeshift dance party in a room lined with commuter bikes. In attendance were Artie, the special-ed teacher (who was making hats for people out of newspaper and packing tape), Kevin, the realtor/children’s music singer with the backyard hens, and James, who is working for a kiteboarding company after a stint teaching at the Outdoor School. I passed out around 2 am and rode back to the duplex at 4:30 to let Edie out, rolling out of bed at noon to get coffee and biscuits, and then I did sudoku while Damon showed a prospective camp member the 20-foot shelter he has set up in the backyard to get ready for Burning Man. Then I read a PD James book I got at the mysteries-only bookstore on Hawthorne (I finally finished Geek Love) while the lovebirds took Edie for a walk at Laurelhurst Park.

The guy in the picture: Georg Simon Ohm, German physicist, 1789-1854.

7,700 years ago: Mount Mazama, in what is now southern Oregon, erupts. It collapses in on itself, forming a deep crater which fills with melted snow over the next 600-800 years. Crater Lake, the seventh-deepest (592m) lake in the world, is born. It is a nutrient-poor lake with no inlets or outlets, preventing particulate matter from shading the depths below.

6,000 years ago (?): The lake becomes home to Drepanocladus aduncus, a species of freshwater moss which, thanks to the availability of sunlight in the lake, was able to establish itself nearly 600 feet below the lake’s surface.

4,000 years ago: Mazama erupts again, forming lava features such as Wizard Island. Wizard Island in turn has a crater upon it, giving us a “crater on an island in a lake in a crater.“

106+ years ago: A single hemlock tree falls into the lake, where it continues to float, upright and with its root system submerged, to this day. It is dubbed “The Old Man of the Lake.”

106 years ago: Crater Lake National Park is established, making it National Park #7.

70 years ago: A scientific survey is undertaken to plot the windblown movements of The Old Man. It is noted that, atop the four-foot bleached-white column of his stump that sits above water, there lives a small patch of moss.

20 years ago: A one-manned submersible brings up some Drepanocladus from the not-so-murky depths.

2 years ago: Robot subs conduct further research on the interesting bryophyte.

2 days from now: Me, walking around on Wizard island, giggling about how the world’s oldest group of terrestrial photosynthesizers has one of its members lounging around under 600 feet of melted snow in the bottom of a dormant volcano, which itself resides within 183,224 acres of federally protected parkland … parkland found in a state which has voted for every Democratic presidential candidate since 1988. I think I’ll enjoy living in Oregon.

References:
CNet
NPS

Old-timey geologic survey map from here.

“If when you think of hiking here in the Pacific Northwest, you think of cool, dark, mysterious forests of huge conifers, you’ve got the right picture. The area made rainy by the Cascades, Olympics, and other Pacific coastal ranges is the Conifer Capitol of the World. This is the only large temperate-zone area where conifers utterly overwhelm their broadleaf competitors. It grows conifers bigger than anywhere else, and the resulting tonnage of biomass and square-footage of leaf area, per acre, are the world’s highest, even greater than in tropical rainforests.”

Excerpted from Cascade-Olympic Natural History, Daniel Mathews 1999

photo from here.

There are certain climates which make bird migration seem completely reasonable. I have chosen to fly the 2,500 miles to Oregon so that I can reclaim via fern-gratifying mist some quantity of the gallons of sweat that I had been producing in Texas over the past twelve years. Some will say, “Too much rain!” or “Too cold!” or “Not enough sunlight!” … I will show these naysayers a dew-covered mushroom that has been nibbled upon by a newt, hand them the SPF 45 that I refuse to apply, and tromp off down some spongey trail in search of interesting bryophytes.