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.

Some arbitrary photos

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."

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.

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…

The Fortuna Grow-house