Category Archives: Childhood Memories

Researching Yellowstone

Posted on October 7, 2013 | Leave a comment

This trip was unlike any we had as a family. Most summers, we camped in state or national parks, as do many families of teachers—public servants using the public parks.  We visited nearly every California State Park, our particular favorites including Calaveras, Donner, Grover, Big Basin, and Big Sur. We camped in national forests when we could not get the spot we wanted in a national park, e.g. Yosemite or Grand Canyon or Sequoia. We traveled and camped from June through September, when we started back to school.

Our children began their camping adventures when they were merely weeks old. Dale’s down jacket served as a sleeping bag for a 6 week old and nursing was a snap in the middle of the night. No bottles to boil, no formula to mix—made for an easy vacation. By the time our girls were in high school, they could put up a tent in record time, which was often serious family competition. Cooking on the Coleman stove was a creative art, which we mastered. Therefore, this particular summer, while I was studying, testing, and recording, my family was fishing, swimming, and relaxing by the Yellowstone River.

University of Montana offered this field study. As with any graduate level course, required reading was assigned ahead of time. I ordered the requisite texts, and weeks out, began the reading assignments.  At the start of class was a preliminary test, so I plunged into the mandatory reading while we drove to Yellowstone. This geology course covered scientific testing of some of 10,000 hot spots, such as geysers, fumaroles, and mud pots.  By casting a fishing line, attached with a thermometer or water-collecting instruments, into geyser basins, researchers gathered data without endangering lives.  Every season, occasional tourists and random pets fall prey to geysers or fumaroles by straying too far from the boarded walkways and falling into the boiling waters—despite the posted warnings, newspaper accounts, and cautionary words of rangers. Some locals keep mortality rates on visitors searching for that perfect picture, or unleashed, wandering dogs that lose their lives to the hot springs, or bison who pummel them.

For our research, we were nowhere near the boarded walkways or civilization. We collected data in the Norris Basin, the most seismically active area of the park, and therefore the most dangerous. We brought along biological testing kits and medical supplies and a park ranger, who carried his walkie-talkie, our only link to the outside world and help, should we need it. Recording data all day long in the hot summer sun, while dodging flies the size of small bats and mosquitoes the size of small birds, yet this was my idea of an exciting vacation. I love outdoor biology—my true calling—and I felt in my element as I crouched in the dust and dirt, inhaling fumes of sulfur, and batting away at the constant attack by insects.  And, I was ready to pack up and move to Yellowstone permanently.

One particular trek skirted a blackened sulfur pool, a tar-y-blackness that I had seen before, but always in a lab and never in nature. The pool was blacker than the blackest charcoal I ever made in many a science lab, pouring sulfuric acid over sugar, watching as the bubbling mass oozed out of the beaker, while students ooh’d and aah’d and held their noses.  Here, we stopped to run the spectrophotometer and assess the compounds present in nearby streams and fumaroles. We ran tests to measure biologic variations, to assess seismic changes in the basin—to determine the rapid or slow but constant evolution that Yellowstone is famous for. The dramatic variations in color are due to the differences in pH and temperature and we tested nearly every color in the spectrum.

On the last day of our vacation, my exhausted family bedded down at nightfall, while I studied by flashlight for my final exam.  Sammy saw a bear, the one animal she had searched for, and which earned her Yellowstone National Park Junior Ranger patch, while I earned my one-graduate unit that moved me to the farthest column on the pay scale.

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Posted in animals, Childhood Memories, nature

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Ode to an Old Couch

Posted on October 5, 2013 | Leave a comment

It was in the first year of my “starter marriage” that my husband and I made the substantial purchase of bed, couch, and dining room set. Our prospect of owning “real furniture” was exciting, albeit we lived in a rental apartment. Therefore, when we selected our meager furnishings, we took this task seriously. Who knew how long we would be sitting on this furniture? 5 years? 10 years? Longer?

The couch was long, a full nine feet, with a multitude of pillows, in a straight-back modern style. The fern pattern in chintz fabric was trendy then, done in 1970s colors of blue and brown, and fit perfectly in our tiny apartment. It became my bed many nights over the next year as my husband spent his evenings at the hospital. I drifted off as television channels slowly shut down, one by one until nothing save snow was left on our 12 inch black and white TV. Some nights I listened to the radio and read Stephen King or Michael Creighton, which meant I got no sleep at all. Every sound in the apartment exacerbated my elevated heart rate because there is nothing like reading a horror story before bed. Two years later, older but barely wiser, my “starter marriage” dissolved. I got the household furnishings; he got the car.

The couch crowded out my even tinier apartment, which could not accommodate such a beast, and the blue-brown colors clashed with the lime-green shag carpet. It was a miserable look, but there were no reality shows back in 1981 that could fix this problem. Even in my next house, similar shades of green (trending toward olive) shag rug covered the floors of the turn-of-the-century craftsman, I shoved the couch into a back bedroom. Finally, after being ignored for over four years, the couch was moved to the living room of our new home with my new husband; but, not for long, as within three years we found another place, a larger home to accommodate our growing family, with even worse carpeting in a hideous orange hue. We moved anyway.

For the next five years, the blue-brown couch sat on wall-to-wall ginger-colored carpeting as my husband and I removed “cottage cheese” off the ceiling, wallpaper off the walls, linoleum off the kitchen floors, and eventually the rest of the rug throughout the house. Finally, after years, we enjoyed the couch, but the problem was the couch was too long and fit better in the living room, while our family congregated in the kitchen and family room. On holidays, children and grandparents visited on the couch; on occasional sleepovers, the couch served as futons, and with three-year olds, the cushions became “hideouts,” but eventually our family neglected it for the leather model by the television.

Until recently, that is. Our youngest daughter moved to her college apartment and wanted the sofa, as it matched her tasteful tan carpet. Getting it through the door of the second floor apartment meant Sam and her dad climbed onto the roof and angled it in, but they managed. At the end of that school year, the ingenuity of the college students moved the couch, again, to another place—a five-bedroom house with five fellow music majors. The couch hosted many a concert (all classical music performances) and all the requisite revelry that goes with being in college. Now, in Sam’s third college home, the couch resides in the center of her living room, surrounded by pizza boxes and wine and sheet music and musical instruments. I visited recently, sat on the couch and sank to the floor—the cushions barely respond, the springs are shot, the fabric is thread bare, and stuffing is showing, but the college kids do not mind.

They also do not know this story, so this is for them. Just as I read recently that furniture can be recycled, wood chips reclaimed from wood furnishings, cotton, stuffing, and other fabrics reused, little is tossed in the landfill. My heart smiled at the thought that this old couch and its elements can be recovered or restored like memories.

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Removal of Memories is Wrong

Posted on September 29, 2013 | Leave a comment

Every decade or so, my husband performs a thorough purging, almost purifying, of our garage. We are not hoarders, but we are not OCD people either—somewhere in between the extremes. Most things we keep are because parting represents a removal of memories, some too dear to be recycled. This year, we reminisced over Meghan’s box of bones, stored in a broken cardboard box strewn with spider webs and dust, sweet reminders of 4H children and county fairs, of raised animals and silly adventures.

Meghan, during her second year (a veteran) of 4H, decided for her county fair project to display the bones she acquired through countless hikes and ravine roaming. A random deer skull here, a tibia there, a jawbone found in the bushes, a vertebrae recovered from the gully—all collectables that would stand up against the best of other 4H exhibits. Usual displays included perfectly boxed match cars, Ken and Barbie and Polly Pockets (not a family that I know) and their accessories, horse-cow-pig-goat-or-other-animal ribbons, and the ubiquitous baseball card collections, but our Meghan was a budding scientist, and her collection reflected her scientific inclinations. Each bone within this box had its tale, along with its date found, location, and identification.

Meghan, age 10, approached the stern directors of the collections exhibits at the Monterey County Fair, Exhibit Hall “A.” She carefully placed her meticulously itemized and organized bones on the table and smiled, and Meghan looked perfect in her uniform. The two gray-haired, experienced veterans of “supreme collections” smiled in return. 4H children in their crisp, white shirts adorned with green hats and scarves, are the embodiment of perfect children—wholesome, spunky, yet respectful, and most importantly, sparkling clean.  The elderly women nodded as they took Meghan’s box and handed her the receipt for retrieval at the end of the fair. We would know the results of the judging by Friday.

The box included one three-foot vertebral column from a steer, complete with beef jerky between each vertebrae. Meghan dragged that still moist and meaty spine for over a mile to our house. I said, “I am not taking that home,” and she said, “Fine, I will,” and then she proceeded to heave it all the way. I was sure it would be dropped somewhere between our house and the backwoods we hiked, but my daughter proved me wrong, pulling that thing all the way home.  Five random deer skulls also in the box showed the insatiable appetite of our local mountain lion. The mountain lion snaps off the deer snout with brute force, suffocating in a quick swoop. Finally, the box contained numerous other bones, such as jaws or humerus—mostly remnants of deer who once roamed our neighborhood.

Friday morning, after feeding their county pig, Meghan and her sisters ran to the Exhibit Hall. There, in the glass case between the sewing projects and scrapbooks, rested Meghan’s display of bones. Carefully placed just as Meghan would have done herself, the “Ladies of the Hall” found a way to display a child’s precious memories—moments of learning, moments with family, moments of fun. And, best of all, was the Best of Show ribbon, the purple ribbon that carried a check for $13.98. How can I possibly get rid of this?

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Posted in 4H, Childhood Memories, Humor, nature

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