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.
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