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.