The Fortuna Forest Reserve used to be a paradise for amphibians, but the dreaded Chytrid fungus has killed many of them off. This makes sightings like this one all the more striking.
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Tree frog
The Fortuna Forest Reserve used to be a paradise for amphibians, but the dreaded Chytrid fungus has killed many of them off. This makes sightings like this one all the more striking.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
To thy own role...
I am the resident movie-critic at the Fortuna Forest Reserve. That’s one of my roles here. My other role is possessor of the largest English lexicon. I am also the best roaster of chicken, the deftest applier of Indian spices onto potatoes, and connoisseur of non-Panamanian beers. I am a cultural historian of the United States, a subject with which I speak with absolute authority if occasional embellishment. I am an expert of American football, sole-bearer of knowledge of frigid winters, the knower of which aged celebrity is still alive. I have the best technique for shucking garlic. I am the tallest person and naturally the one who gets things off high shelves.
I am not really a movie-critic, per se. Sometimes people come up to me and ask “What is this movie about?” The Shining? It’s about a man who lives in a large hotel with his family over the winter and is crazy and tries to kill them all. “Oh.” It’s very good. Chinatown? It is about a man who is a private police and finds the conspiracy of an old man who had a child with his daughter and is taking all of the water of Los Angeles for himself. “Oh.” You like Jack Nicolson then? She thought so anyways. Finding Nemo? It is the tale of a clown fish who…
When Arturo saw Pulp Fiction, which he loved, he made liberal use of the N-word. I had to put a stop to that. “Brian, my n----r!” Arturo, please. The girls Carmen and Delvis seem to love Gone with the Wind, and so maybe Clark Gable will live forever (I have that terrible power here). You might think it strange to watch a 3+ hour harlequin American civil-war epic more than three times in a month, and all that in the jungles of Panama, but everyone just kind of shuts up when it’s on. Which is a nice change of pace.
My chicken and potatoes are very popular, I think, because they are made the same way everywhere else in Panama. When I make too much and ask if anyone wants leftovers, I notice they dig in even if they just ate. Even with the profuse amount of garlic I add, which I shuck with lightening speed, to the admiration of all within sight. I can reduce a whole bulb of garlic to its constituent cloves within one minute, a skill of perhaps dubious value even in a 16th century Romanian castle. I use my bare hands. Its just virtuosity. No, you cannot learn to do it.
There is an easy way to break the tension with speakers of another language, and that is to trade curses and otherwise naughty-words. It is a mutual exchange, and now I am as capable of Spanish potty mouth as Arturo is of uttering full grammatical English sentences that ought to register as one foul beep. It is also enjoyable to correct someone’s expletive. Use the S-word when you drop something, Arturo. Not the C-one.
It is important to have roles. At Fortuna everyone is driven by their work and what needs to get done. The only skills that are naturally valued are technical skills applied to urgent technical problems. It can be an exhausting exercise in being a complete tool. Take away diversions and extraneous skills and talents and roles and this place becomes a dudgeon, with trucks driving through and long rainy days and atrophied neural pleasure-centers and mouths drawn like thin straight lines in pencil. Sometimes it gets that way anyways. But carving out something to be when you aren’t your project is not just a luxury. It is a necessary escape.
It is like that movie The Great Escape. About the men of the World War two who try to escape from the Nazis and each has a different job and they tunnel under the fence and run away…and are killed mostly. That will be a good movie for tonight.
I am not really a movie-critic, per se. Sometimes people come up to me and ask “What is this movie about?” The Shining? It’s about a man who lives in a large hotel with his family over the winter and is crazy and tries to kill them all. “Oh.” It’s very good. Chinatown? It is about a man who is a private police and finds the conspiracy of an old man who had a child with his daughter and is taking all of the water of Los Angeles for himself. “Oh.” You like Jack Nicolson then? She thought so anyways. Finding Nemo? It is the tale of a clown fish who…
When Arturo saw Pulp Fiction, which he loved, he made liberal use of the N-word. I had to put a stop to that. “Brian, my n----r!” Arturo, please. The girls Carmen and Delvis seem to love Gone with the Wind, and so maybe Clark Gable will live forever (I have that terrible power here). You might think it strange to watch a 3+ hour harlequin American civil-war epic more than three times in a month, and all that in the jungles of Panama, but everyone just kind of shuts up when it’s on. Which is a nice change of pace.
My chicken and potatoes are very popular, I think, because they are made the same way everywhere else in Panama. When I make too much and ask if anyone wants leftovers, I notice they dig in even if they just ate. Even with the profuse amount of garlic I add, which I shuck with lightening speed, to the admiration of all within sight. I can reduce a whole bulb of garlic to its constituent cloves within one minute, a skill of perhaps dubious value even in a 16th century Romanian castle. I use my bare hands. Its just virtuosity. No, you cannot learn to do it.
There is an easy way to break the tension with speakers of another language, and that is to trade curses and otherwise naughty-words. It is a mutual exchange, and now I am as capable of Spanish potty mouth as Arturo is of uttering full grammatical English sentences that ought to register as one foul beep. It is also enjoyable to correct someone’s expletive. Use the S-word when you drop something, Arturo. Not the C-one.
It is important to have roles. At Fortuna everyone is driven by their work and what needs to get done. The only skills that are naturally valued are technical skills applied to urgent technical problems. It can be an exhausting exercise in being a complete tool. Take away diversions and extraneous skills and talents and roles and this place becomes a dudgeon, with trucks driving through and long rainy days and atrophied neural pleasure-centers and mouths drawn like thin straight lines in pencil. Sometimes it gets that way anyways. But carving out something to be when you aren’t your project is not just a luxury. It is a necessary escape.
It is like that movie The Great Escape. About the men of the World War two who try to escape from the Nazis and each has a different job and they tunnel under the fence and run away…and are killed mostly. That will be a good movie for tonight.
Tuesday, July 6, 2010
Saturday, July 3, 2010
A...flower.
When you wear shirts this color, humming birds fly directly towards you and hover in front of you for a minute, sizing you up for a flower. It's always strange to see them checking out a red gas can.
Red without autumn
The new leaves of Oreomunnia mexicana have delayed greening. They come out yellow and curled and then turn a fantastic red.
Memories
This is the river that McKenna and I followed to the road to get out of the forest during her visit.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Nobody is the most normal person you ever met
I hope I write with due respect
Arturo is a kuna Indian, which means nothing. This is confusing for people when they first meet him. They wait for him to do something kuna—they don’t know what it means but they’ll know it when they see it. But he drinks Abuelo rum, loves music from the 1980s, and would like to get away to Panama City to see a concert performance of Chicago, if only he could get away from the job. He knows some of the medicinal properties of plants, but when I’m feeling green he tells me to have some rum with lemon and raw garlic. It doesn’t help anything. Try it if you revel in a world of pure sensation.
Arturo is a plant taxonomist, which makes him very useful to someone studying species turnover. He walks along the trails spryly and when he sees something he’d like a photograph of he excitedly removes his digital camera from a plastic case and baggie and takes a few shots. He speaks English in a strange way. His memory is photographic—appropriate for a tropical plant taxonomist—and he can translate the nouns for just about anything. But he doesn’t speak fluently and he mispronounces awfully.
If, for instance, he saw a snake that day, he will excitedly tell me
“Brian, today I see a big snatch.”
A big snatch? Good for you.
“I have pictures!”
Bravo.
The truck has a bench seat, where the passenger and driver seat are connected, and when Arturo drives he crushes you like a can against the dashboard. This is because he’s about five feet nothing. You can’t tell how hold he is. He could be anywhere from 30 to 60. If you use the truck before him his feet don’t even reach the pedals.
Arturo was there for the US invasion of Panama in the 80s, and he saw soldiers marching through the streets, and tanks, and heard machine gun fire, and smoke grenades. It was all a big show and it didn’t affect him in any profound way. He wants to visit the United States, particularly the city of Chicago, because he thinks this is the city of Jim Dalling (my adviser, his boss), who is English and lives in Champaign. But never mind. We talk about how one day he will visit Jim in Chicago, where that isn’t the ocean but a very big lake, and it is freezing in winter and stifling in summer. The city that Sinatra sung of. No, the other city. The second city. The windy city. Perhaps they’ll ride together on the big Ferris wheel at Navy Pier, and Jim will point his house out in the distance.
Sometimes I tell Arturo about America as if I were an emissary, shipwrecked in Central America without a map. That is, with some artistic liberty. He asks me interesting questions. How do American’s feel about President Carter signing over control of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians.
Oh, Arturo. That is a very hot issue. I don’t bring that up in mixed company.
Do we like the current president of Panama.
We are not sure of him yet. We want to see more action.
“More action?”
But what can I say. The truth? That we don’t care about Panama, by and large? So I lie.
We want to know what he is doing for the people of Panama, I say. We want to see him deliver to you on some of his campaign promises.
Would you believe it? That is exactly the sentiment of the Panamanians. Lucky guess. But I flatter myself on a presence of mind for the great averaging impulses.
Arturo has a girlfriend in David who thinks he should spend more time in the City, away from Fortuna. She has a picture on her wall of an Indian washing her clothes with a sailboat in the harbor in the background. The sails have swastikas on them, and when I point them out to Arturo he laughs a little and says “Like Hitler?” Not exactly, I say. That’s likely a Buddhist symbol. The painting is Indian. “Indian?” says Arutro. “Like kuna?” No, I say. Not like the kuna. Arturo is relieved--the Kuna are not Nazis. Unlike the Indians. And the Buddha.
Arturo’s girlfriend’s name is Kenya. She’s very nice and sensible, but Arturo can only bend so far. He visits when he can. But he’s sentimental about Fortuna. About Jim, about the forest, about the 1 hectare plots he sets up and samples and re-samples. About his position as the largely unsupervised manager of all Jim’s students and assistants. About the music, clothing, and movies of the 1980s. About Lionel Richie, who he prefers even to Michael Jackson, and whose music videos he’s collected in anthology on compact discs with movie files. More to the heart of it, perhaps mostly about another woman.
The love of his life was a Cuban refugee, who had somehow, in a confusing episode of Caribbean-American geopolitics, ended up in Panama City. She was there for about one year of their six-year relationship before she left to join the rest of her family in Miami. They stayed together through letters and phone calls, until, abruptly, Arturo stopped hearing back from her. Weeks went by before he learned from her family that she’d died in a car accident. He was unable to attend the funeral.
He took it hard and didn’t concern himself with romance again for about another ten years. If you think I write too freely about his depths and torments, he speaks quite freely, if still feelingly, of those events. An entire decade of abstinence, spent in large-part in the jungles of Barro Colorado Island and Fortuna, but without the associated eccentricities one might expect. He never became withdrawn, antisocial, or overly-spiritual, even in his mourning. Yet I imagine there was something special in it that life together and marriage didn’t offer him, a sort of sustained notion of an ideal that experience could never repudiate. But that’s all my analysis. It is his life. I digress.
Perhaps it is wrong to say it means nothing for Arturo to be Kuna. He can speak kuna. His family came from a kuna village. He grew up kuna. I remember talking to someone at a hostel about working with a kuna Indian.
“Does he wear traditional clothes?” he asked.
And I imagined Arturo in Amerindian garb. With face paint and all that. And I said no.
No, he’s probably the most normal guy you’ll ever meet.
But of course he isn’t. And no one is.
Arturo is a kuna Indian, which means nothing. This is confusing for people when they first meet him. They wait for him to do something kuna—they don’t know what it means but they’ll know it when they see it. But he drinks Abuelo rum, loves music from the 1980s, and would like to get away to Panama City to see a concert performance of Chicago, if only he could get away from the job. He knows some of the medicinal properties of plants, but when I’m feeling green he tells me to have some rum with lemon and raw garlic. It doesn’t help anything. Try it if you revel in a world of pure sensation.
Arturo is a plant taxonomist, which makes him very useful to someone studying species turnover. He walks along the trails spryly and when he sees something he’d like a photograph of he excitedly removes his digital camera from a plastic case and baggie and takes a few shots. He speaks English in a strange way. His memory is photographic—appropriate for a tropical plant taxonomist—and he can translate the nouns for just about anything. But he doesn’t speak fluently and he mispronounces awfully.
If, for instance, he saw a snake that day, he will excitedly tell me
“Brian, today I see a big snatch.”
A big snatch? Good for you.
“I have pictures!”
Bravo.
The truck has a bench seat, where the passenger and driver seat are connected, and when Arturo drives he crushes you like a can against the dashboard. This is because he’s about five feet nothing. You can’t tell how hold he is. He could be anywhere from 30 to 60. If you use the truck before him his feet don’t even reach the pedals.
Arturo was there for the US invasion of Panama in the 80s, and he saw soldiers marching through the streets, and tanks, and heard machine gun fire, and smoke grenades. It was all a big show and it didn’t affect him in any profound way. He wants to visit the United States, particularly the city of Chicago, because he thinks this is the city of Jim Dalling (my adviser, his boss), who is English and lives in Champaign. But never mind. We talk about how one day he will visit Jim in Chicago, where that isn’t the ocean but a very big lake, and it is freezing in winter and stifling in summer. The city that Sinatra sung of. No, the other city. The second city. The windy city. Perhaps they’ll ride together on the big Ferris wheel at Navy Pier, and Jim will point his house out in the distance.
Sometimes I tell Arturo about America as if I were an emissary, shipwrecked in Central America without a map. That is, with some artistic liberty. He asks me interesting questions. How do American’s feel about President Carter signing over control of the Panama Canal to the Panamanians.
Oh, Arturo. That is a very hot issue. I don’t bring that up in mixed company.
Do we like the current president of Panama.
We are not sure of him yet. We want to see more action.
“More action?”
But what can I say. The truth? That we don’t care about Panama, by and large? So I lie.
We want to know what he is doing for the people of Panama, I say. We want to see him deliver to you on some of his campaign promises.
Would you believe it? That is exactly the sentiment of the Panamanians. Lucky guess. But I flatter myself on a presence of mind for the great averaging impulses.
Arturo has a girlfriend in David who thinks he should spend more time in the City, away from Fortuna. She has a picture on her wall of an Indian washing her clothes with a sailboat in the harbor in the background. The sails have swastikas on them, and when I point them out to Arturo he laughs a little and says “Like Hitler?” Not exactly, I say. That’s likely a Buddhist symbol. The painting is Indian. “Indian?” says Arutro. “Like kuna?” No, I say. Not like the kuna. Arturo is relieved--the Kuna are not Nazis. Unlike the Indians. And the Buddha.
Arturo’s girlfriend’s name is Kenya. She’s very nice and sensible, but Arturo can only bend so far. He visits when he can. But he’s sentimental about Fortuna. About Jim, about the forest, about the 1 hectare plots he sets up and samples and re-samples. About his position as the largely unsupervised manager of all Jim’s students and assistants. About the music, clothing, and movies of the 1980s. About Lionel Richie, who he prefers even to Michael Jackson, and whose music videos he’s collected in anthology on compact discs with movie files. More to the heart of it, perhaps mostly about another woman.
The love of his life was a Cuban refugee, who had somehow, in a confusing episode of Caribbean-American geopolitics, ended up in Panama City. She was there for about one year of their six-year relationship before she left to join the rest of her family in Miami. They stayed together through letters and phone calls, until, abruptly, Arturo stopped hearing back from her. Weeks went by before he learned from her family that she’d died in a car accident. He was unable to attend the funeral.
He took it hard and didn’t concern himself with romance again for about another ten years. If you think I write too freely about his depths and torments, he speaks quite freely, if still feelingly, of those events. An entire decade of abstinence, spent in large-part in the jungles of Barro Colorado Island and Fortuna, but without the associated eccentricities one might expect. He never became withdrawn, antisocial, or overly-spiritual, even in his mourning. Yet I imagine there was something special in it that life together and marriage didn’t offer him, a sort of sustained notion of an ideal that experience could never repudiate. But that’s all my analysis. It is his life. I digress.
Perhaps it is wrong to say it means nothing for Arturo to be Kuna. He can speak kuna. His family came from a kuna village. He grew up kuna. I remember talking to someone at a hostel about working with a kuna Indian.
“Does he wear traditional clothes?” he asked.
And I imagined Arturo in Amerindian garb. With face paint and all that. And I said no.
No, he’s probably the most normal guy you’ll ever meet.
But of course he isn’t. And no one is.
Friday, June 25, 2010
Sometimes the fog
The sun sets and rises faster here. And I don't mean poetically. The earth spinners faster here then it does further from the equator. So you don't get very picturesque evenings usually. The sun lingers only directly overhead. But sometimes the fog rolls over the mountains nicely.
Saturday, June 19, 2010
Thanks mom
My mom let me use her ridiculous Nikon camera for the last two months of my stay in Panama, which I hope will result in some better photos appearing on the blog. It also gives me something to do. Thanks mom!
A heliconia flower
The heliconia are a type of flowering plant that have nothing to do with palm trees. Their flowers are these large hanging affairs. I find something eerie about them, mostly due to the combination of blanched stalk and red hairs giving the appearance of animal flesh.
The Experiment
The Experiment (with a capital "E") appears to have done fine in my absence. Of course, this is because of the expert way I managed things, and is not a statement about the value of my presence.
Scale intentionally left ambiguous
These guys are all over the place at the research house, but they aren't aggressive and you have to learn to ignore them.
Tuesday, May 18, 2010
It’s been awhile
Not updating one’s blog becomes a habit. The rationale becomes, well, I just have too much to say, to say anything at all. It’s that same embarrassment of riches that keeps one from arguing that the bag-lady isn’t Napoleon. Where to begin?
I went to Costa Rica for a week. A tourist visa in Panama gives you three-months. After three-months, you can get pulled out of a bus (during one of the mandatory check-points when entering Chiriqui from Panama), stopped while driving, or have your passport demanded by a policeman, and they will rifle through your travelogue for the Panama Stamp, perform a mental calculation for the given date, and you get into trouble. What kind of trouble? I don’t know. The main thing to avoid in such a situation is ever to lay yourself so deliberately into the hands of a policeman.
I was pulled out of a bus on my first trip from Panama to Chiriqui. They wanted my passport. They couldn’t understand why I might not have it on me. The other passengers couldn’t either. I’d left it at the research site deliberately, as I fear losing it. Luckily I was travelling with my Smithsonian ID tag, and when I showed them that, and indicated I had a “passporte especial diplomatica”, they were satisfied and let me back on the bus.
The alternative, I like to think, was torture.
So what can you do? You can go to Costa Rica after three months. You stay out of the country for at least 72 hours, and you can return for another 3 months. A company called Tracopa operates out of the bus terminal in David, and they take a medium-sized bus into San Jose once a day.
I have little to say about my trip to Costa Rica. It rained the entire time. I took online exams on my computer, ate at the hotel restaurant, and watched movie after glorious movie. Sometimes from the bathtub. The wonderful phenomena of reliable, high-speed wifi, seemingly endless hot water, and fresh linens everyday made the trip enjoyable. I’d left Carlos in charge of feeding the plants their regiment of hydroponic growth solutions.
Then I returned to Panama fairly refreshed and thought to myself—you’ve been going about it all wrong, Brian. You can’t work at Fortuna and not know you’ve got a ticket out every three weeks or so. Three weeks on, one week off, was about the maximum rotation a person with a reasonable grip on sanity can handle.
So there was a whirlwind time. With Carlos’ help, I found and trained an assistant to run the experiment. I ran around doing all the field work the growth-experiment needed at the moment, which involved hunting down species of interest to replace the waves of seedlings bound for the after-grow. Then I split. I went to Panama City, where I started setting up the next data-set of interest.
In a nutshell, I am looking at whether plants form ecological niches around different chemical forms of the same soil resources. All plants need phosphorus to grow, I’m just trying to see if they are specializing to acquire that phosphorus from different sources. The big picture is to find ways all these species manage to coexist in a world where, according to every mathematical model we have, even the most infinitesimal (and consistent) competitive advantage would lead to a one-species monopoly. There are other angles I can talk about, and in grant-form the research is presented to emphasize the qualities that appeal to the mission of the granting-institution, but to me the above is a fairly decent synopsis.
My plants are growing hydroponically limited to different chemical forms of phosphorus. My adviser has data on the relative abundance of these plants across plots on different soil types. My current lab work is aimed at determining whether these plots have different fractions of the phosphorus-compounds I’m feeding to my plants. The end goal is to present a story that sounds like this: Species A grows better than B,C, and D on phosphorus form A, and is most abundant in forest plots with soils rich IN phosphorus form A.
If you don’t understand that, you’re a child, and I forgive you. Try to think of plants as dragons and chemical forms of phosphorus as flavors of ice cream. Now: I want to figure out if different types of dragons stick to certain flavors of ice cream, so I’m feeding dragons only specific types of ice cream and seeing how fast they grow. In addition, I’m exploring the magic ice cream glades where these dragons live to see if they choose caves where their favorite ice cream is most readily available. Right now, I am paying someone to feed my dragons their ice cream, while I look at the ice cream in the dragon’s native environment to see what type it is.
But I won’t strain that analogy any further. You don’t want to know what happens to the dragons come harvest time.
Ah, and what else! As my gift for reaching the half-way point in my research, I am coming back to the United States for two weeks! This trip is a strong motivating force in my life right now. When I return to Panama, I will be thinking of wrapping things up, getting all the additional data I need, and even thinking about what’s next in my charmed life.
So I’ve left lots out, no doubt, but you’ve heard from me.
I went to Costa Rica for a week. A tourist visa in Panama gives you three-months. After three-months, you can get pulled out of a bus (during one of the mandatory check-points when entering Chiriqui from Panama), stopped while driving, or have your passport demanded by a policeman, and they will rifle through your travelogue for the Panama Stamp, perform a mental calculation for the given date, and you get into trouble. What kind of trouble? I don’t know. The main thing to avoid in such a situation is ever to lay yourself so deliberately into the hands of a policeman.
I was pulled out of a bus on my first trip from Panama to Chiriqui. They wanted my passport. They couldn’t understand why I might not have it on me. The other passengers couldn’t either. I’d left it at the research site deliberately, as I fear losing it. Luckily I was travelling with my Smithsonian ID tag, and when I showed them that, and indicated I had a “passporte especial diplomatica”, they were satisfied and let me back on the bus.
The alternative, I like to think, was torture.
So what can you do? You can go to Costa Rica after three months. You stay out of the country for at least 72 hours, and you can return for another 3 months. A company called Tracopa operates out of the bus terminal in David, and they take a medium-sized bus into San Jose once a day.
I have little to say about my trip to Costa Rica. It rained the entire time. I took online exams on my computer, ate at the hotel restaurant, and watched movie after glorious movie. Sometimes from the bathtub. The wonderful phenomena of reliable, high-speed wifi, seemingly endless hot water, and fresh linens everyday made the trip enjoyable. I’d left Carlos in charge of feeding the plants their regiment of hydroponic growth solutions.
Then I returned to Panama fairly refreshed and thought to myself—you’ve been going about it all wrong, Brian. You can’t work at Fortuna and not know you’ve got a ticket out every three weeks or so. Three weeks on, one week off, was about the maximum rotation a person with a reasonable grip on sanity can handle.
So there was a whirlwind time. With Carlos’ help, I found and trained an assistant to run the experiment. I ran around doing all the field work the growth-experiment needed at the moment, which involved hunting down species of interest to replace the waves of seedlings bound for the after-grow. Then I split. I went to Panama City, where I started setting up the next data-set of interest.
In a nutshell, I am looking at whether plants form ecological niches around different chemical forms of the same soil resources. All plants need phosphorus to grow, I’m just trying to see if they are specializing to acquire that phosphorus from different sources. The big picture is to find ways all these species manage to coexist in a world where, according to every mathematical model we have, even the most infinitesimal (and consistent) competitive advantage would lead to a one-species monopoly. There are other angles I can talk about, and in grant-form the research is presented to emphasize the qualities that appeal to the mission of the granting-institution, but to me the above is a fairly decent synopsis.
My plants are growing hydroponically limited to different chemical forms of phosphorus. My adviser has data on the relative abundance of these plants across plots on different soil types. My current lab work is aimed at determining whether these plots have different fractions of the phosphorus-compounds I’m feeding to my plants. The end goal is to present a story that sounds like this: Species A grows better than B,C, and D on phosphorus form A, and is most abundant in forest plots with soils rich IN phosphorus form A.
If you don’t understand that, you’re a child, and I forgive you. Try to think of plants as dragons and chemical forms of phosphorus as flavors of ice cream. Now: I want to figure out if different types of dragons stick to certain flavors of ice cream, so I’m feeding dragons only specific types of ice cream and seeing how fast they grow. In addition, I’m exploring the magic ice cream glades where these dragons live to see if they choose caves where their favorite ice cream is most readily available. Right now, I am paying someone to feed my dragons their ice cream, while I look at the ice cream in the dragon’s native environment to see what type it is.
But I won’t strain that analogy any further. You don’t want to know what happens to the dragons come harvest time.
Ah, and what else! As my gift for reaching the half-way point in my research, I am coming back to the United States for two weeks! This trip is a strong motivating force in my life right now. When I return to Panama, I will be thinking of wrapping things up, getting all the additional data I need, and even thinking about what’s next in my charmed life.
So I’ve left lots out, no doubt, but you’ve heard from me.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Truly Based on a Story
To the left is actor Leon Jaramillo. Handsome, fashionable, a sort-of Latin-American George Clooney in his ER years. To the right is Pablo Escobar. Twisted, balding, unkempt, with those blank dark eyes that bespeak an evil unhampered with doubt or remorse. The left stars in a popular biopic miniseries depicting the life of the right, who may or may not have dressed entirely in black, carried a gold-plated pistol, and let his looks go as soon as people starting photographing him.
The show is called “El Capo.” When Jim Dalling first visited Fortuna, I pointed it out to him.
“Have you seen El Capo, Jim? It’s kind of a Panamanian 24.”
I watched the television as Leon Jaramillo stared at the screen in a series of increasingly close close-ups. Some paramilitary-types were closing in on his cave, and him and his two bodacious bodyguards were reacting by posing dramatically and approaching the camera. It was a sequence that may single-handedly have repudiated the axioms of Alfred Hitchcock, namely that lack of action is what leads to suspense. His adversaries always seemed just around the corner, but there was just more cave, and El Capo had time enough to exhaust his catalog of vivid squints.
“No no,” said Jim. “This is a true story. This is all about Pablo Escobar.”
More squints, more bodacious bodyguards, deeper descent into the cave.
“They seem to have taken some artistic liberties, Jim,” I pointed out.
“I think it’s pretty accurate,” he said.
It’s strange how, once you get outside your native tongue, TV and movies get reduced to the thick paint strokes of genre. Dramatic chase, tearful vows and promises, gun fight where nameless goons and policeman are traded but no one with a speaking role dies, suspension of action, betrayal by best friend, scene-where-you-are-sure-the-main-character-won’t-die, his improbable escape, a casual strut from an explosion, an angry police captain barking into a radio in red-faced and spittle-heavy futility.
From what I can tell, Pablo Escobar is the hero of the story, which has him alternating tears with stoic manliness.
“How many Mexican stand-ups can this man survive?” I ask. I am told to shhh. El Capo has taken his shirt off, to be replaced later by an identical black shirt, from a closet full of black shirts and pants and coat-jackets and shiny black shoes.
I recall from the book “Hunting Pablo Escobar,” the man’s naked and coke fueled soccer orgies, binding the hands and legs of a thieving party bartender and drowning him in his swimming pool in front of a house full of guests, shooting down an entire jetliner to kill a single person on it.
Filthy lies. El Capo would never do any of those things. Look at the way he befriends orphans and loves his mother and stays true to his one love, amidst so much temptation in the form of a loyal and buxom security force. And doesn’t use drugs. Or sell them. Not onscreen anyways.
A cop holds a gun to El Capo’s head, but El Capo isn’t nearly as terrified as I am. Not El Capo! Shoot anyone but Pablo Escobar! You just don’t know him the way I do!
But I’ll have to wait next week for the thrilling ten-minute denouement of the gun-held-to-head scene, complete with the hammer-being-pulled-back and the finger-bracing-hard-against-the-trigger. But it’ll take more than a mere bullet to kill El Capo. I’ve seen the man shot dozens of times, in and out through the leg or the arm—anything to get him out of those soiled black clothes and into some new ones.
Three and a half stars.
Monday, April 5, 2010
Sometimes I get to kill people
When I speak with Arturo, I have the terrible power to either kill or spare various famous people. Frank Sinatra? Dead. John Lennon? Dead. Marlon Brando? Dead. Ringo Starr? Alive.
Alive?
Yes. And looking great.
Arturo wipes the sweat from his brow as I press my finger tips together and prepare to obliterate his next line-up. Stevie Wonder? Alive. The members of the Eagles? I take a sip from my canteen as he shifts nervously in his seat. I don’t know for sure and smile at the sadistic joy of either killing or sparing them—me, the possessor of up-to-date VIP obituaries, with the aging celebrities clamoring before me, a gladiator-game for hair-bands, pop-stars, lounge singers and actors—we who are about to die salute you!
They’re alive, I say.
All of them, says Arturo, hopefully.
I give each of them a penetrating stare through the cross-hairs of my mind’s eye, but am moved to mercy.
For now.
What?
Yes, all of them.
NOTE
In my confusion I once accidentally killed Paul McCartney. It happened because Arturo was trying to ask me IF he was dead, and I exclaimed “Paul McCartney is dead!?” This left me with the awkward task of bringing him back to life, but Arturo was skeptical. “Why haven’t I heard any of his music in years?” he said. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Paul is living on a farm,” I said. I stopped short of explaining how he was happier there, now that he was able to run around freely over all those sprawling acres.
Alive?
Yes. And looking great.
Arturo wipes the sweat from his brow as I press my finger tips together and prepare to obliterate his next line-up. Stevie Wonder? Alive. The members of the Eagles? I take a sip from my canteen as he shifts nervously in his seat. I don’t know for sure and smile at the sadistic joy of either killing or sparing them—me, the possessor of up-to-date VIP obituaries, with the aging celebrities clamoring before me, a gladiator-game for hair-bands, pop-stars, lounge singers and actors—we who are about to die salute you!
They’re alive, I say.
All of them, says Arturo, hopefully.
I give each of them a penetrating stare through the cross-hairs of my mind’s eye, but am moved to mercy.
For now.
What?
Yes, all of them.
NOTE
In my confusion I once accidentally killed Paul McCartney. It happened because Arturo was trying to ask me IF he was dead, and I exclaimed “Paul McCartney is dead!?” This left me with the awkward task of bringing him back to life, but Arturo was skeptical. “Why haven’t I heard any of his music in years?” he said. I put my hand on his shoulder. “Paul is living on a farm,” I said. I stopped short of explaining how he was happier there, now that he was able to run around freely over all those sprawling acres.
Friday, April 2, 2010
Funding
I received a small grant today. The Tinker Field Research Grant! At $1000, it is a relative whopper. Let me break them all down for you:
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Short-Term Fellowship -- $2800
Clark Research Support Grant -- $500
Tinker Field Research Grant -- $1000
Sigma-Xi Research Support Grant -- pending ($1000 requested)
Govindjee Research Support Grant -- pending ($1000 requested)
These are not really research grants. They exist to defray ordinary living expenses your advisor would rather die in extraordinary pain than pay. These include hostels, groceries, gasoline, bus, taxi, and airfare.
The other two grants I have pending are the big ones, applied for in November of last year, each for three-years of tuition and an annual stipend of $30k, with a one-time travel award and access to a Cray Supercomputer thrown in to spice things up. I should hear back from these sometime in April but I'm not optimistic. These are the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy's graduate research fellowships, respectively.
It's not readily appreciated just how cheaply things have to be done. I'm using the steel frame of a greenhouse I had to disassemble by hand and send up to Fortuna. I was only allowed to do this because the owner was essentially muscled into acquiescence by the co-adviser on the project, Ben Turner. Literally a steal. I bought plastic and shadecloth for about $100, all of the conetainers, racks, and tables were either sent up to Fortuna by me or fashioned out of scrapwood by Carlos on site. The microscopes and glassware I'm using are loaners, the various chemicals sum up in cost to about $850, and housing at Casa B is free. Which is why it is packed with people.
The sand, which I've mentioned earlier, is literally beach sand, sold at less than $1 / 75 lbs. I sleep in a borrowed sleeping bag. Every week Arturo and I trade off whose blood gets injected into the ink cartridge so we can continue to print things. That last one is a lie.
My point is, today is a big day for me. I just got $1000.
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute Short-Term Fellowship -- $2800
Clark Research Support Grant -- $500
Tinker Field Research Grant -- $1000
Sigma-Xi Research Support Grant -- pending ($1000 requested)
Govindjee Research Support Grant -- pending ($1000 requested)
These are not really research grants. They exist to defray ordinary living expenses your advisor would rather die in extraordinary pain than pay. These include hostels, groceries, gasoline, bus, taxi, and airfare.
The other two grants I have pending are the big ones, applied for in November of last year, each for three-years of tuition and an annual stipend of $30k, with a one-time travel award and access to a Cray Supercomputer thrown in to spice things up. I should hear back from these sometime in April but I'm not optimistic. These are the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy's graduate research fellowships, respectively.
It's not readily appreciated just how cheaply things have to be done. I'm using the steel frame of a greenhouse I had to disassemble by hand and send up to Fortuna. I was only allowed to do this because the owner was essentially muscled into acquiescence by the co-adviser on the project, Ben Turner. Literally a steal. I bought plastic and shadecloth for about $100, all of the conetainers, racks, and tables were either sent up to Fortuna by me or fashioned out of scrapwood by Carlos on site. The microscopes and glassware I'm using are loaners, the various chemicals sum up in cost to about $850, and housing at Casa B is free. Which is why it is packed with people.
The sand, which I've mentioned earlier, is literally beach sand, sold at less than $1 / 75 lbs. I sleep in a borrowed sleeping bag. Every week Arturo and I trade off whose blood gets injected into the ink cartridge so we can continue to print things. That last one is a lie.
My point is, today is a big day for me. I just got $1000.
Thursday, April 1, 2010
Problem/Solution (?) -- a day in my life
Problem: Plants are dying from transplant shock and excessive dryness
Solution: More shade cloth
Solution 2: Bigger plants
Soil Clay Content
While most the plants I grow go straight into sand, it is necessary sometimes to form a que of volunteers ready to risk their lives in the soilless media. So I pot them in soil.
This activity CAN be rewarding. There is something intrinsically refreshing about putting a fresh bare-root seedling into a dark pot of soil. However, Fortuna conspires to rob one of this simple pleasure.
The problem is that the soils are often formed of a thin layer of humus over a solid mass of pure clay. The humus layer, besides being thin, is a tangled meshwork of roots and leaves that is difficult to obtain in any quantity. And the clay is a malleable, solid mass. Fun to play with, and even efficient at holding onto nutrients, but in its super-abundance it often forms one solid puck in the pot, whose center is virtually impenetrable to water.
There are multiple tests designed to assess the clay-content of soil. Here I review two.
First, if you can take the soil and easily spell the word "CLAY" with it, it is almost entirely made of clay. This test has yet to achieve the status of universal standard, but has much to speak for it. The letters involve circular arcs, perpendicular intersections, and 45 degree intersections. And don't even get me started on that awkward horizontal line near the top of the "A". A litmus test if there ever was one.
Of course, there will always be critics. Some hold onto the old standard, which says that if, and only if, the soil can be used to symbolically represent two interpenetrating realities, is it truly clayey.
However, most feel that this is a waste of time.
This activity CAN be rewarding. There is something intrinsically refreshing about putting a fresh bare-root seedling into a dark pot of soil. However, Fortuna conspires to rob one of this simple pleasure.
The problem is that the soils are often formed of a thin layer of humus over a solid mass of pure clay. The humus layer, besides being thin, is a tangled meshwork of roots and leaves that is difficult to obtain in any quantity. And the clay is a malleable, solid mass. Fun to play with, and even efficient at holding onto nutrients, but in its super-abundance it often forms one solid puck in the pot, whose center is virtually impenetrable to water.
There are multiple tests designed to assess the clay-content of soil. Here I review two.
First, if you can take the soil and easily spell the word "CLAY" with it, it is almost entirely made of clay. This test has yet to achieve the status of universal standard, but has much to speak for it. The letters involve circular arcs, perpendicular intersections, and 45 degree intersections. And don't even get me started on that awkward horizontal line near the top of the "A". A litmus test if there ever was one.
Of course, there will always be critics. Some hold onto the old standard, which says that if, and only if, the soil can be used to symbolically represent two interpenetrating realities, is it truly clayey.
However, most feel that this is a waste of time.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Photo Competition
This picture is not from Panama. It is from South Africa. It is relevant because I changed the name of the blog from "beinvenido a panama" to the eponymous "Brian Steidinger."
Which I feel I should explain. It isn't egomania. I was trying to increase the likelihood that this page would appear in a google search of my name.
Anyways, I have submitted this photo into a competition at the University of Illinois. If you are a student at the UIUC you can vote at http://uviewillinois.com. The main prize is small but the contest interests me nonetheless.
What you are seeing is a man named Clifford who makes his money by taking groups of students and tourists into rural townships, where they take lots of pictures and buy some hand-crafted goods. The township is inside the Wits Rural facility in eastern South Africa. Wits Rural is literally an ecological/anthropological station set up to study human beings living inside rural villages. The name of the village, I believe, is Belferden. That sounds vaugely Afrikaaner.
Clifford is wearing a black Adidas jacket and pants, despite the fact that it is nearly 100 degrees outside. He is sending a text message. Behind him a witchdoctor is walking away. Disdainfully? In symbolic rejection of modernization? Of assimulation? I'll leave the interpretation to you. But if you ask me, it looks like she has attitude, and there is a tension to the shot.
Tarantula
This morning I found a tarantula on the floor of the field house. I looked at it for a while, somehow believing it was fake. Arturo was at the sink washing dishes, and I just stared at it.
"Arturo?" I said. Nothing.
"Arturo?" I said. Nothing.
"Arturo, there is a tarantula in the house," I said. Arturo turned around. I pointed downwards, at the entrance to the kitchen.
My first instinct in this case was to do nothing and let Arturo handle it. Having spent upwards of 6 years living at the field house almost continuously, I was sure that tarantulas had ceased to sap him with fear and indecision.
"What do I do?" said Arturo.
"I don't know," I said.
He thought for a moment and then disappeared, leaving me barracaded in the room, the tarantula in my path.
"Arturo!" I said. "Where are you?"
He came back with a broom and tentatively poked the tarantula with it. In my direction. I took a few steps back, sure that its first move would be to bound up my leg with incredible speed and bite me directly in the crotch. But it just lifted its rear legs and let Arturo push him towards the door. Eventually Arturo lifted the broom, and the tarantula's rear legs stuck to the fibers of the broom, leaving it suspended in mid air like a trapeze artist. He walked with it like that to the edge of a fence, and brushed the tarantula aganst a hanging vine until it reluctantly held on.
Then we took these pictures, which came out not-so-well. I would have taken one of it in the house, but it was between me and my camera.
My birthday
When McKenna came down to Fortuna to help me start my project, my first thought was that it might be a little boring. I know from experience she prefers grueling, physically taxing biology, and I feared all I had to offer was transplanting and tagging plants.
This is someone who I'd seen bruised and battered from the heat and aciacia thorns of South Africa, who picked a bat out of a mist-net with her bare hand, her middle knuckle bracing an angry face sporting a rapidly biting set of razor sharp teeth.
Luckily, I did have some field work. We needed to collect two species that had died waiting for the experiment to start amidst so many delays. This work necessitated entering two distinctively different forest types. The first was Chorro, a palm dominated site, described by Jim Dalling as the snakiest place at Fortuna. We entered in the middle of a rain storm, found the plants, collected, and then got lost.
Luckily, I had my compass. I bring my compass with me to the forest and, as I enter, point myself out. This is far from fool proof. Depending on where you walk, you could have to descend a steep, clayey embankment, the center of an ephemeral stream, or right through a jungle dense with vines and ferns covered in a meshwork of tiny spines.
Somehow I managed to take us on a root through all three. While this sort of thing frustrates me, McKenna had occasion to observe on this first outing, as we huddled for shelted under an enormous palm frond, that it reminded her of Teddy Roosevelt's excersise of drawing a straight line on a map and dealing with any obstacle encountered along it.
That was the first field day. On the second, which was sunny and beautiful, I took us to a much easier forest plot, with a well-marked trail, where you can be reasonably sure you won't set your foot directly on anything you'd rather not.
Somehow I got us even more lost. This time we had to descend along a straight line until we reached a river bank. The problem?
McKenna: "the last stream we forded was going from right to left."
Me: "Yes?"
McKenna: "this one is going from right to left."
Me: "So."
McKenna: "we're on the other side now."
Me: "Shit."
What had happened to the stream in the meantime? I have no idea. Apparently it was a minor tributary, and on our meandering course backwards we had intersected with the main stream. Is that logical--it's what I said at the time, let's leave it at that. So we kept to it and headed towards the highway, climbing up and down boulders, occasionally climbing uphill to get past a steep and impassable bank. At one point I found a rare species of interest--a single plant, and I picked it out of the soil and looked at it. At this point we were almost home-free--we could hear the road, but not see it, for some time, so I started carrying it. When I dropped it McKenna picked it up, held it in her teeth, and climbed up a boulder behind me.
Apparently she felt bad when, handing her a bag full of soil down another boulder, along a steep river-bank, it dropped down, its contents spilling into the river in a brown cloud.
That was my birthday. When we got back to the field house, we watched our movie. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is our movie. "I'm sorry I couldn't make you a cake," she said.
I forgave her. It was easily my best birthday in three years.
People of Earth!
Here is an official update on the Fortuna situation.
With the help of Jim Dalling and Arturo Morris I was able to locate and identify the species I am interested in studying. I collected these and brought them back to the STRI-station and planted them in soil. After the construction of the grow-house, I was eager to start the experiment, but a number of things prevented this. Including:
1. One of the chemicals I wanted to feed to the plants--RNA--proved utterly insoluble in water. I'd never have guessed this looking at the MSDS and Sigma-Aldrich spec-sheets, but its true. So I had to go back to Panama City, via an 8-hour bus, and spend some time at the Tupper labs figuring out how to dissolve it.
After contacting another researcher--Alex Cheeseman--at the University of Florida, and working with Ben Turner, we decided to try a 1% dillution (10 mg RNA/1 mL water) in a solution containing EDTA. EDTA is a molecule that surrounds stubbornly insoluble ions with charged groups and pulls them into solution. But EDTA and increased dillution wasn't enough. I also used a sonicator--a device that produces high frequency sound, to shake and heat the solution into submission. Judging from the headache I got from using the device, it is also an implement of torture. The yellow-tinted product was the source of much mental taxation.
2. I didn't have enough pots for the plants and these were late in being sent
3. I didn't have enough deionized water and foolishly waited for it to be sent along with the pots
4. The sand needed to be re-washed in acid to ensure I'd gotten rid of all the calcium carbonate.
5. One of the species has a very high mortality rate from transplant shock. This had to be recollected.
Every time I think I'm out, something seems to pull me back in.
Luckily, McKenna's visit provided a means to get another biologist on the case. Together we were able to get the experiment started. We collected species that had died waiting and transplanted three species into sand. The protocol for feeding the plants hydroponic solution with one of four different types of phosphorus was calculated before-hand. Viola!
Of course, some of the plants are dying from transplant shock. In particular, one species (Oreomunnia mexicana) is almost entirely dead. The experiment is running but all of the species have yet to be transplanted. The key is every day to build it more than it fell apart the day before.
The above rhyme was entirely improvised and makes a good mantra. My other mantra is "chill out". Other mantras have been suggested, such as "be patient and stay calm, good things will come to you." My brother suggests "Rome wasn't built in a day."
My response: "Rome wasn't built in six months either."
With the help of Jim Dalling and Arturo Morris I was able to locate and identify the species I am interested in studying. I collected these and brought them back to the STRI-station and planted them in soil. After the construction of the grow-house, I was eager to start the experiment, but a number of things prevented this. Including:
1. One of the chemicals I wanted to feed to the plants--RNA--proved utterly insoluble in water. I'd never have guessed this looking at the MSDS and Sigma-Aldrich spec-sheets, but its true. So I had to go back to Panama City, via an 8-hour bus, and spend some time at the Tupper labs figuring out how to dissolve it.
After contacting another researcher--Alex Cheeseman--at the University of Florida, and working with Ben Turner, we decided to try a 1% dillution (10 mg RNA/1 mL water) in a solution containing EDTA. EDTA is a molecule that surrounds stubbornly insoluble ions with charged groups and pulls them into solution. But EDTA and increased dillution wasn't enough. I also used a sonicator--a device that produces high frequency sound, to shake and heat the solution into submission. Judging from the headache I got from using the device, it is also an implement of torture. The yellow-tinted product was the source of much mental taxation.
2. I didn't have enough pots for the plants and these were late in being sent
3. I didn't have enough deionized water and foolishly waited for it to be sent along with the pots
4. The sand needed to be re-washed in acid to ensure I'd gotten rid of all the calcium carbonate.
5. One of the species has a very high mortality rate from transplant shock. This had to be recollected.
Every time I think I'm out, something seems to pull me back in.
Luckily, McKenna's visit provided a means to get another biologist on the case. Together we were able to get the experiment started. We collected species that had died waiting and transplanted three species into sand. The protocol for feeding the plants hydroponic solution with one of four different types of phosphorus was calculated before-hand. Viola!
Of course, some of the plants are dying from transplant shock. In particular, one species (Oreomunnia mexicana) is almost entirely dead. The experiment is running but all of the species have yet to be transplanted. The key is every day to build it more than it fell apart the day before.
The above rhyme was entirely improvised and makes a good mantra. My other mantra is "chill out". Other mantras have been suggested, such as "be patient and stay calm, good things will come to you." My brother suggests "Rome wasn't built in a day."
My response: "Rome wasn't built in six months either."
Saturday, March 27, 2010
First, a word about my telephone
I'd like to thank everyone for promptly informing me that my telephone doesn't work, and also for the emails to the effect that I ought to update the blog more often.
First, there is no cell phone coverage in Fortuna, where I spend 90% of my time. I can only get a signal down by La Mina, further to the city of David. The phone works.
Second, internet service at Fortuna is unreliable and, when working, extremely slow. So this complicates matters considerably.
First, there is no cell phone coverage in Fortuna, where I spend 90% of my time. I can only get a signal down by La Mina, further to the city of David. The phone works.
Second, internet service at Fortuna is unreliable and, when working, extremely slow. So this complicates matters considerably.
Friday, March 19, 2010
A bit of public venting
I realize the world at large is eager for some goodies from Fortuna. But you will have to endure this post before the more exotic stuff. It is my public venting.
Raulph and Erick. They do research for the Nitroff group, which involves fertilizing small plots with nitrogen around the Fortuna reserve. This experiment is being run by a primary investigator somewhere in Germany.
Raulph and Erik snore. Loudly. I share my room with the both of them when they visit Fortuna, and I admit to having a low tolerance for such an intrusion. Raulph’s whole body goes into contortions as he snores at night, until he finally subsides into a steady wheezing punctuated only by explosive snorts. His eyes dart back and forth beneath their lids in the reverie of REM sleep, and every morning he awakes to eagerly relate the details of his latest vivid dream.
“I think it means you should sleep outside,” I say, by way of interpretation.
Things between Raulph and I have been tense ever since he found me hovering over him, having ascended through the domes of ice of his sleepy Xanadu back into the disassembled bunk of his bed. And there I was, fluffing an extra pillow for him, my eyes two bloodshot orbs fluorescing a hellish neon red.
My proffered pillow was respectfully declined.
Fortuna can be difficult like this. For instance, I find myself having to pencil in time with pieces I’d scarcely learned to consider lab equipment back home. For instance, the table.
As absurd as it sounds to the civilized world, at Fortuna we have “the” table—the one and only table. If you want to use it, you’d better make a reservation. And what’s the alternative—the gritty, spider-carcass riddled floor? Your lap? When it comes to a raised and fairly level surface, there’s just no beating the table.
When it rains at Fortuna, the water from the tap becomes an opaque brown solution that resembles—inasmuch as it is—mud. And there’s nothing quite like pouring your water through a coffee filter and then discarding the waded mass of brown pulp.
Like sloths, the people of Fortuna host a permanent colony of fungus growing from their clothing, which, fused with the aroma of laundry detergent, becomes a noxious gas that smells exactly as it tastes. The detergent mitigates the smell of the mold about as well as a tic tac might take the edge off a steaming pile of poop.
In Central America, they love to eat rice. If you indicate you would like just a “little rice,” this is interpreted as a mistranslation, and your plate is molded over into a convex dish—one hulking mass of rice, with the rest of your food for garnishing. If you suggest you’d like no rice at all, you are told to go straight to hell.
As I am learning a new language—Spanish—I come to appreciate the frequency with which questions are answered with other questions. It is a sad realization. For as soon as my careful considered question—can I use the table, will you eat some of my rice, is Raulph allergic to peanuts—is articulated, it is returned in an impenetrable wall of unknown words, finished with the rising inflexion of a counter-question.
I wake up each morning and have a wonderful cup of coffee—or sometimes tepid water that has yet to be de-mudded, but I’m getting better at that. I feel powerful and intellectually alert and on top of the world. And if, after a hard day, that high has burnt out, or the day has failed to return its promise, I know that there will always be more coffee tomorrow. And the next day. And the next day. And so on…
Raulph and Erick. They do research for the Nitroff group, which involves fertilizing small plots with nitrogen around the Fortuna reserve. This experiment is being run by a primary investigator somewhere in Germany.
Raulph and Erik snore. Loudly. I share my room with the both of them when they visit Fortuna, and I admit to having a low tolerance for such an intrusion. Raulph’s whole body goes into contortions as he snores at night, until he finally subsides into a steady wheezing punctuated only by explosive snorts. His eyes dart back and forth beneath their lids in the reverie of REM sleep, and every morning he awakes to eagerly relate the details of his latest vivid dream.
“I think it means you should sleep outside,” I say, by way of interpretation.
Things between Raulph and I have been tense ever since he found me hovering over him, having ascended through the domes of ice of his sleepy Xanadu back into the disassembled bunk of his bed. And there I was, fluffing an extra pillow for him, my eyes two bloodshot orbs fluorescing a hellish neon red.
My proffered pillow was respectfully declined.
Fortuna can be difficult like this. For instance, I find myself having to pencil in time with pieces I’d scarcely learned to consider lab equipment back home. For instance, the table.
As absurd as it sounds to the civilized world, at Fortuna we have “the” table—the one and only table. If you want to use it, you’d better make a reservation. And what’s the alternative—the gritty, spider-carcass riddled floor? Your lap? When it comes to a raised and fairly level surface, there’s just no beating the table.
When it rains at Fortuna, the water from the tap becomes an opaque brown solution that resembles—inasmuch as it is—mud. And there’s nothing quite like pouring your water through a coffee filter and then discarding the waded mass of brown pulp.
Like sloths, the people of Fortuna host a permanent colony of fungus growing from their clothing, which, fused with the aroma of laundry detergent, becomes a noxious gas that smells exactly as it tastes. The detergent mitigates the smell of the mold about as well as a tic tac might take the edge off a steaming pile of poop.
In Central America, they love to eat rice. If you indicate you would like just a “little rice,” this is interpreted as a mistranslation, and your plate is molded over into a convex dish—one hulking mass of rice, with the rest of your food for garnishing. If you suggest you’d like no rice at all, you are told to go straight to hell.
As I am learning a new language—Spanish—I come to appreciate the frequency with which questions are answered with other questions. It is a sad realization. For as soon as my careful considered question—can I use the table, will you eat some of my rice, is Raulph allergic to peanuts—is articulated, it is returned in an impenetrable wall of unknown words, finished with the rising inflexion of a counter-question.
I wake up each morning and have a wonderful cup of coffee—or sometimes tepid water that has yet to be de-mudded, but I’m getting better at that. I feel powerful and intellectually alert and on top of the world. And if, after a hard day, that high has burnt out, or the day has failed to return its promise, I know that there will always be more coffee tomorrow. And the next day. And the next day. And so on…
Thursday, March 4, 2010
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