Newts In Love

It's spring, and--I know you're all with me on this--our thoughts invariably turn to amphibian sex. It's obvious to me, as a volunteer Frog Shuttler, that frogs are highly motivated to reproduce; the males somewhat more avidly, I think, but I could be projecting. Male frogs are hoppiting to the vernal ponds well in advance of the females, but the females do get it in gear eventually, and then there's lots of hugging and cuddling and things squirt out and new frogs happen.

All of that sort of makes sense to most of us. The frogs reproduce by means of external fertilization, meaning they need to provide the materials for tadpole assembly, but it all happens outside of the bodies of the consenting adult frogs. Still, we all recognize an embrace.

It's the salamanders that always seemed more problematic. The literature is straightforward. With few exceptions, they fertilize internally. Now you're talking, we think. But no. The male deposits a sperm packet somewhere, usually in water, and then the female meanders over and picks it up later with her hoo-hoo. And then the internal fertilization takes place.

This doesn't make sense to us. It feels remote. There's not enough...friction, let's call it. Even Louis C.K. never said "If you don't mind, I'm going to jack off over here, and then, what say you come over and sit on the wet spot?" Nobody really wants to sit on the wet spot. Although, of course, if it's underwater anyway, it's probably not such a big deal. Still, where's the female's motivation?

Newts, as anyone staring into a pond in springtime knows--and isn't that all of us?--are very handsy. They are all over the females and they aren't interested in letting go. Sometimes a lot of males are all over one female, creating something called a Newt Ball. Nothing about this seems sexually persuasive, and in fact, females have been known to drown in the attention. Although in many species across the animal kingdom it is the females that choose their mates, this may not be the case for newts. However researchers have discovered that there is at least one newt species in which the female sometimes gets out of the situation by feigning death. You do what you have to.

Well, what apparently seals the deal with salamanders is our old friends the pheromones. The males produce pheromones that entice the females to swell up in the critical sperm-packet-reception area, which probably feels better than it sounds, and in some cases they lead the female to the junction as well. In one observed species, the male deposits his sperm packet, which probably feels better than it sounds, and then wafts pheromones toward his female of choice (basically all of them) and coaxes her to follow him as he backs up toward his packet of Genetic Legacy, and then when she's in the right spot he turns sideways in a blocking move.

It all seems to work and I doubt there's anything clinical about it. We are not in turkey-baster territory here. Probably I've been thinking about it wrong. We all know how it feels to be massively attracted to someone clear across a room, even before any friction is involved. We don't really understand that either, but it is undeniable. So that's the deal with spring salamanders. It isn't only about sex.

It's love.

Fido and Fideux

Do you want someone who thinks you're perfect just the way you are, and will love you without condition or reserve, in sickness and in health, in petulance and in affability? Of course you do. And if you have an extra $50,000 lying around the house near a nice dog, you can have it forever and ever. That's what it costs to get your dog copied and shipped so you can take that guesswork out of finding your new best friend. Yes, you too can thumb your nose at death and loneliness and get a whole new fifteen years of picking up poop through the simplicity of cloning.

Everyone remembers that first clone, Dolly the sheep. Sheep were considered ideal subjects for cloning because no one could tell them apart anyway. But Dolly was merely the first animal cloned from a body cell. The first animal cloned at all was a sea urchin. Hans Dreisch did it in 1885, presumably after having developed quite a fondness for a particular urchin. He shook an urchin embryo until its cells came unglued and discovered that the loose cells became identical urchins. He was delighted. The other biologists talked about him behind his back.

In 1902, Han Spemann continued the work with the altogether more laudable Salamander. He was able to separate its embryonic cells by teasing them apart with a loop of baby hair. He made identical salamanders up to a certain point of embryonic development, after which his cells just produced half-embryos, resulting in salamanders that paddled around in circles all their lives. There is today no market for cloned pet salamanders, because all salamander lovers know each one is just as wonderful as the next.

The first pet cloned was a cat, through the auspices of an outfit called Genetic Savings and Clone. Cats come cheaper. I could have gotten a whole new (Saint) Larry for a paltry 25 grand. I'm not inclined to, though. I know I can do just fine by selecting a short-haired tortoiseshell kitten the next time I'm bereft, even it if arrived the old-fashioned way, through cat lust. Tortoiseshell kitties are the very very best. I know this from the 100% satisfaction rating I got using my scientifically unimpeachable sample size of One. I most certainly was looking for a tortoiseshell the last time I went to the Humane Society, after Larry had been gone a year, but there weren't any that day, and my need for an immediate cat overcame my inclination to wait for a speckly one, and that's how Tater ensued. Tater wasn't the first one I played with but she was the only one with any personality, and my streak of picking funny and affectionate cats is unbroken: Tater is one fine bundle of furry pudding. Unfortunately her adoration is almost completely directed toward Dave. She'll give me the time of day but it's Dave that lights her up. I have to go down the street now to be greeted properly by a cat, a small torty named Millie who is willing to take a good rumpling and whose owner is no longer alarmed by me.

There's only one explanation for the price discrepancy between getting a dog cloned and a cat cloned, and it's not the one the company provides. The company says the entire operation is expensive because they have the very best equipment and the very finest staff with the very stoutest salaries, but it's got to be the same equipment they're using for the $15,000 cloned cow. Presumably the cat is less expensive because surrogate mommy cats go into heat more often than dogs do. So they're charging twice as much just to make you wait around until the bitch gets frisky? I don't think so. I think it's a matter of demand. I think they know dog people are just that much more nuts. A cat person that nuts just accumulates a bunch more cats.

Low-tech clone

There's no guarantee though. What if you buy your cloned dog and it's everything your old dog was, except enamored of you? What if it likes your spouse better? As long as it doesn't  have horns and an extra tail, you're not getting a refund.

Plus, you're not the same person you were fifteen years ago when you got your best dog. You've completely forgotten what a pain in the ass your best dog was as a puppy, and you're fifteen years crankier about dealing with it.

Many people suggest that this whole project is a waste of fifty grand when you could buy a bazillion mosquito nets for Africans with the same money, but that's a strained argument. You wouldn't have done that anyway.

On Sucking

The cloud's silver lining is more of an ash gray at this point, but here it is: the predicted highs of 100 in Portland in Jesus Johnson September did not arrive because wildfire smoke obscured the sun. This is what counts for good news in Climate-Change-Denial Land.

At sundown, it was 87 degrees and snowing. Snowing something. Because my idea of quarantining young men between the ages of 12 and 28 has never gained traction, we now have 33,000 acres of pristine forest on fire, and counting. The Columbia River Gorge, strenuously green and laced with waterfalls, is systematically being incinerated and its ash redistributed over the Portland area. This follows a particularly hot and dry summer season which we have been advised will be our new normal. Anywhere you live, actually, you may now expect a new normal, but--our short attention spans aside--novelty is not in itself a worthy goal. The wildfire currently consuming the Gorge is a direct consequence of humanity's systematic extraction and burning of otherwise dormant carbon stores over the last couple hundred years. With punctuation provided by one or two young assholes with firecrackers.

We first heard the news while eating lunch in a diner on Mt. Hood. The waitress brought over a glass of water with a plastic straw in it. "Hold the straw," I forgot to say. Seems like straws come automatic these days, and it always surprises me. I can't think of anything I drink that needs a straw, let alone everything I drink. There's a campaign on now to get people to say "no" to straws. It probably started with the heartbreaking video of a rescue worker pulling a plastic straw out of a sea turtle's nostril. Straws, and all other plastic garbage, have a way of making it to the ocean.

Things are going to have to change around here, and straws seem like easy enough targets to start with. Because when do we ever need a straw? If we're not prone in a hospital bed with only a bendy straw between us and nutrition, when do we need one? Must we suck? So. At the very least let us campaign against straws.

I tried, when I got a glass of water at a local brewpub that prides itself on being environmentally friendly. They answered my letter promptly:

While the concern for sea life is pressing, most of Portland's garbage goes to the Columbia Ridge Landfill, which is located east of The Dalles and away from the Columbia. There would have to be some extenuating circumstances for our plastic trash to make its way into the ocean.

Extenuating circumstances! Yes. And yet those are what somehow manage to send 5.25 trillion pieces of plastic to our oceans. Sad, as they say, but that's circumstance for you.

We used to use biodegradable plastics for straws and to-go wares. Unfortunately, Portland stopped accepting these items in their composting program, and we had to take a hard look at our disposables. We ended up making the decision to stock a high post-consumer recycled content straw, because if it's all headed to the landfill we want to make sure that we're using a plastic that has lived through more than one cycle and been utilized to its full potential.

Okay. However, there is such a thing as a paper straw. And, there is such a thing as not needing a straw in the first place. I grew up without plastic straws and air conditioning and a lot of other things that we now apparently need. So did the rest of the humans that existed before about 1970, which is quite a good portion of them, all told.

A friend offered an explanation for the sudden proliferation of straws. "I think it started with lipstick," she said. "Lipstick is too hard to wash off glasses, and requires human scrubbing, which is not cost-efficient. Thus, straws are provided with each glass in case the human plans to put lipstick on it." All righty then, that makes sense. Lipstick: another plastic tube containing significant amounts of palm oil retrieved for profit from monoculture plantations for which gigantic swaths of primary forest have been razed, resulting in 80-100% loss of native species, and also containing compounds that kill fish and plankton and cause mutations in amphibians, packaged together in order that we might provocatively accentuate our pieholes, and necessitate the use of plastic straws to trim labor costs.

Dear lord, dear large theoretical sky person who cares about us and watches over the sparrow that falls, by all that is holy--and I would include here the moss and ferns and pikas and salamanders of the Columbia River Gorge--may we humans begin to define "what we need" as what we...actually...need? And, failing that, dear lord, might you allow us to suck less?

Friends Tour 1: Pittsburgh

Well we packed our bags and grabbed our passports and set sail for Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh doesn't make everyone's list for destination cities. One imagines it to be filled with smudgy turn-of-the-century steelworkers in helmets and sturdy pants who keep themselves from jumping into the three available rivers by drinking industrial-grade beer. Probably it's the "Pitts" part that colors the picture, but Pittsburgh was not meant as a descriptive name. It was named by a British general named Forbes who was sucking up to a British statesman named Pitt and he got the honors by doing well in the French and Indian War, so you're not going to get an American spin on it. Otherwise it would be Steel And Sandwiches, Pennsylvania.

The point of the trip was to check up on our beloveds and make sure they weren't living in catastrophic conditions. Pittsburgh is one of fifty or sixty cities that is currently being touted as "the next Portland, Oregon," which is a fine thing. Ideally, we would discover that our friends are thriving in an agreeable town, but not one so fine that they don't want to come back to Portland where they belong.

Pittsburgh native

"Friends" is accurate enough, but Dave (Big Dave, to distinguish him from Little Dave, Store Dave, Homeless Dave, Republican Dave, and my own Old Dave) is more like our son. He is the man we greatly flatter ourselves to imagine that we could have turned out all by ourselves, assuming of course that he got only our finest traits and none of our parenting skills, which remain unproven and unlikely. Lucky for him, he was born to and raised by others and delivered to our care only when he was nearly ripe and needed just a few more spins in the polisher. He then doubled down by marrying Vivi, a miracle match he was able to find only after scouring the intertubes all the way to Brazil. Now they are together and demonstrating the meaning of love and marriage to the rest of us. In Pittsburgh.

So, well, shit. Pittsburgh is pretty fine. It has an Aviary and a Conservatory and a huge bunch of forest and eight million bridges and a swell little ballpark temporarily hosting the World Champion Chicago Cubs (I like to say that just to see if I get hit by lightning), and spiffy houses in cozy self-contained neighborhoods, just like Portland, except in brick. Also, there's a Church of Beer.

They tailored the tour to our tastes. And that is how one day we found ourselves in the very room where Hannibal Lector murdered those police officers, on the very day the director of Silence Of The Lambs--Old Dave's favorite movie--died. And that is how on another day we walked through Frick Park where I promptly located two salamanders. This is a pretty good city, I thought unhappily, tucking the amphibians back under their logs. Perhaps it was my troubled look that led two Park Conservancy employees to ask me if I needed help. Do you have any red efts? I asked, naturally, and they weren't sure, but suggested perhaps I could take a look in Salamander Park.

What the sequin-studded chocolate-coated gold-plated pudding-filled Heck did you just say?

Salamander Park. They said Salamander Park. Pittsburgh has a Salamander Park.

I give up. Dave and Vivi are in Pittsburgh. They'll be fine in Pittsburgh. The beer isn't as good, but they don't even drink. They'll be fine.

Creature Comfort

It occurs to me that part of the genius of Nature is that it is all about comfort. At any given time, anything you're likely to see in the natural world is comfortable, or otherwise it would be somewhere else. Every living thing seeks its own comfort. It's not precisely the word ecologists use, but it's what they mean.

We're not talking about cats, here. Really doesn't matter where they are. They are going to be comfortable wherever they land and make it seem like a matter of policy. It's not really a policy. It has more to do with the fact that, with the exception of the big bone in their heads they use to keep their eyes lined up, they are entirely filled with pudding. They could sink all the way to the bottom of a bed of nails and emerge yawning and unspindled.

So cats have sort of punched their own ticket, comfort-wise, which is why the invasive little suckers act like they belong anywhere they roll up, including under my bird feeder, even though they totally do not. But we're talking about other living things that, in the course of their perambulations, are going to follow a comfort gradient to the cushiest available niche. I started thinking about it when my fellow frog-wrangler Karen kept finding salamanders, magnificent migrating salamanders, and I didn't. What was her secret?

"I look for them in the cracks of the pavement," she said. Oh! We're trying to rescue frogs and other amphibians as they cross the road, which they will do as long as it's wet. But evidently the salamanders pause when they come across a fissure in the asphalt, and maybe they slide right in, and it's probably just that much damper in there, and the sides of the crevice feel all cozy and nice, and they hang out a while. It's soothing to imagine all the imperfections of the pavement mortared up by comfortable salamanders. Except for that traffic thing.

But comfort is not limited to salamanders. Here in the Pacific Northwest, it's hard to find a surface that hasn't been colonized by beauty. Lichens will appear in any likely spot that has a modicum of moisture and light. Then they'll get even more comfortable by secreting acids that crumble up the surface just an eensy bit, and settle in like a dude molding his butt in a bean bag chair. And if it's not too sunny and not too dry, any random moss spore that happens by will snug its butt in right on top of the lichens. And as the mosses grow and parts of them disintegrate, they decompose into a nice spongy soil. And then regular plants stick a toe in and say aaaah. You can look at just about any tree-crotch in Portland and discover an entire miniature forest made up of comfortable things, just enjoying their Goldilocks moment.

That's why I'm here too. I rattled into this little fissure of the world and stayed put. I'm comfortable in the dear damp and the fertile gloom of our close grey skies, a place where the forecast "intermittent sunshine" refers to July. Where our star is modest and polite, asks if this is a good time before barging in, keeps its music low. If it means I have to let moss set up camp on my northern flanks, it's worth it.

Draining The Swamp

Daddy and I always went out salamandering in the springtime, so we knew where all the best spots were. When it was looking to be a fine warm wet night, he'd grab his camera and flashlights and we'd hit the vernal ponds looking for spotted salamanders. Because if a puddle party of spotted salamanders doesn't inflate your soul, you've got more problems than can be addressed in church.

So he was the first to notice when they started paving them over. Ditches were gratuitously filled in, damp spots were erased. As an educated man who married a nice Lutheran woman, he didn't have access to a lot of salt in his vocabulary, and had to make up for it with actual eloquence, delivered in a preacher's cadence and for the benefit of nobody's ears but mine. The powers that be had seen every pond as a seep of contagion and an eyesore, and done their damnedest to eliminate them. I was young, and certainly understood the value of spotted salamanders, and if they represented even half the worth of the ponds, that made them quite worthy enough. Daddy had even more knowledge in the bank. I remember swatting bugs one hot summer day and whining "What good are mosquitoes anyway?" and Daddy didn't miss a beat. "Frog food," he said. Well then. Okay!

People are, collectively, stupid. They'll take an axe to an oak if they need a toothpick in December, and then complain about the lack of shade in July. Individual people can be pretty smart, but they get together and stupid right up.

It takes time and attention to learn what there is to learn in this world, but people, collectively, know a lot about wetlands now. All those boggy spots might appear to those without imagination to be worthless, but those people are as blind as they can be. Wetlands mitigate flooding, restore shorelines, filter water, sustain life, cache groundwater. For free. The Army Corps of Engineers can get as fancy as they please with concrete but they can't come close to duplicating the value of the wetlands, and they don't come cheap, neither.

Someone recently lurched into power with a promise to drain the swamp. A lot of people think he has broken that promise, because they see he has packed the pus-pockets of power with even more privateers and pirates than we had before. But they didn't take him literally enough. The other day, just taking a break between drowning refugees and jacking off the Big Oil boys, he drained the swamp. He put the boot to the Clean Water Rule that protects wetlands. Apparently, it cuts into golf course profits.

Some people can look right at the magnificent, unmatched genius of nature and see nothing of worth--nothing as valuable as, say, a Walmart on a slab. Two main reasons: they're greedy, and they're stupid. Don't underestimate the stupid. And so the trees come down, and the swamp is filled, and the concrete flows, and the Walmart pimples up, and the true bill is left for someone else to pay, down the line.



That's who is in charge now. Someone who will mine your organs for their value on the black market and then rig you up with a respirator and dialysis and say, See? Good as new! Bummer about your liver. But some day someone'll come up with a replacement for that, too. The best replacement, a beautiful thing, like you wouldn't believe!

Olm, Sweet Olm

Thanks to my friend Linda, I know stuff about the olm, such as: there is such a thing as an olm. The olm is a long skinny white salamander that lives exclusively in central Europe. I am sure that is true, because if there were an American olm, it would have noodled its way to Linda's vicinity and peeked out and waved a tiny little arm at her, and--and--she would have noticed it.

People send me information like this because I am a huge salamander fan. And as such, I welcome salamanders of every race and creed. That's my official position, but just between you and me, my fondness is not evenly distributed. I'm shallow. When I say salamanders are the most attractive animals on the planet, I'm kind of referring to certain ones. I'm partial to the Plethodons. Even the estimable Ambystomas are a little ribby and fat-headed for my taste. But show me a nice flat-headed number with a big smile and big round eyes and little perfect fingers that cannot make a fist, and cue the swoon.

That does not describe the olm. First, there's the matter of its color. White is not a color that really works that well on anybody. True, the olm lives in underground caves in nearly perfect darkness and no one can see him, so his casual attitude toward pigment isn't much different than the fact that I wear pajamas when I'm not planning to leave the house. But the head is all wrong too. You want that smooth round face to hang a smile on. Not a tubular snout with a tiny pie-hole. And the eyes, being useless, have sunk below the skin where they lurk weirdly like eggs-over-easy. Still, we do have a salamander here. What do we know about it?

It lives in the regions of Herzegovina and Croatia where the salamander is well-regarded, being one of their only sources of vowels. The Slovenian word for it is moceril. It means "one that burrows into wetness," and they assure us they mean the salamander. Then they wait for us to use it in a sentence and then they all crack up. Slovenians are assholes.

But not much is known about the olm, because unlike your clownfish and parrots and such, it lives in places no one wants to spend much time in. The locals used to believe they were baby dragons. Some report that the female olm lays upwards of 70 eggs, but only once every six or seven years. Others believe they can also give birth to live young. Yet others believe they spring from the head of the mighty Czklnkynt on St. Pczkwt's Day.

Yes. I bought this. Slovenian coin.

Researchers claim the olm may live up to the freakishly specific age of 58, although others counter that they might reach 68 or even 100. Obviously no one paying attention has yet outlived one of the suckers, and somebody somewhere is receiving grant money to sit next to an aquarium with a notepad at the ready and observe an olm until it goes belly-up. I hope he has cable.

The males are smaller, but can also be distinguished from the females by their relatively larger cloacas during breeding season. In order to determine this a researcher would have to grab several olms to compare and flip them over and poke at their privates. This is the sort of thing ornithologists do to birds all the time, but that doesn't make it polite. Research also indicates the olm, although blind, may be able to orient itself to the earth's magnetic field. There wouldn't be much call for this in a little underground cave of limited scope, but at least they know whether they're coming or going.

They are subject to various environmental pressures now, but are surprisingly resilient. In lab experiments the olm has been shown to be able to remain alive for up to ten years without food. The main threats to the tiny olm are climate change, pollution, and olm researchers.

Hot On Hood

Basically, if at some point on a hike I say "it's just up here around the bend" and Dave says "you do realize we could actually die," you know the Price and Brewster family has had a normal adventure. Dave likes to anticipate the worst so that anything short of death seems like a bargain. I don't care if we die as long as I don't have to be aware of it beforehand.

In this case, we'd come up to Mt. Hood in order to get away from the heat. It was slated to be 100 degrees in town and theoretically the idea of being 6,000 feet higher, where in a normal year we might have snow, back when we used to have normal years, sounded cooler. I think the way most people do it is they drive up to the Timberline Lodge and slug beers inside where, if it's not actually air-conditioned, it is at least a massive enough building that it maintains an even temperature. We didn't do it that way.

No. What we decided to do was see about a few little trails we hadn't been on before. It's getting harder to find those. But we discovered a little nest of them at the end of a dead-end road and we started exploring. It was hot in the shade. But the trails all interconnected, and weren't long. Which gave us plenty of options to bail out. There was a little lake with salamanders in it, a very good sign. The network of trails was like an overturned bowl of spaghetti, and we figured we'd noodle around until we'd exhausted them.

And then we came upon a sign at an intersection. One trail said: "Timberline Lodge 2.5 miles." Really? Dave looked at me. I looked at Dave. Done deal. We can do 2.5 miles on our hands without shaking out pocket change. There's beer at the Lodge. Off we went.

Well, up we went, at a dead trudge. The trail was boulder-strewn and dusty and there wasn't any shade on it anywhere. It was like a spa for scorpions. If it wasn't a hundred degrees, it was one whisker-on-a-desert-rat shy of it. We had water, but salt began to crust on my face. That's about when Dave began to talk about death. He doesn't have a good sense of direction, and it's easy for him to imagine that the trail will go on for fifteen miles and they'll have to send out trained corpse-sniffing badgers to find our papery remains.

And yet, we did paw our way to the top, and Timberline Lodge was there as advertised, and they still sold beer, and the nice waitress allowed as how we could supersize it for a buck, and sure enough a crane came in and lowered a couple massive glasses onto the table for us. And Dave had a second one just to check quality control, and we went outside, where it was still possible to bake a pizza on one's backpack, and, with almost no forethought, and for the first time in forty years, we stuck our thumbs out and got us a ride to the bottom of the mountain.

Took all of thirty seconds. Evidently we don't look very menacing anymore. "Or," I said to the nice snowboarder who picked us up, "maybe after all these years I've still got it." Actually, I don't know if I've still got it, but I admit I did stick it out a little.

"Or maybe he's still got it," the man said, hooking a thumb back toward Dave. God bless America. Everybody's a little more relaxed. It's all good, as long as someone's still got it.

And When I Roll A Log, I Put It Back

Y'all can park your asses on a warm beach in Mexico if you want to, but I'm going to vacation in West Virginia. I'm going to the New River Birding And Nature Festival for the third time, and the birds are plenty compelling--particularly there, where I will be surrounded by people who will point them out for me and hang little name tags on them--but I'm in it for the Nature part too. Especially the salamanders. I stand second to no one in my admiration for salamanders (a.k.a. the crown of Creation). I will be the one rolling logs while everyone else is looking up. There is no place on earth with a greater diversity of salamanders than the southern Appalachians. There's a reason for that.

These mountains have been in the works for a very long time. They started to rise up 480 million years ago and really hit their stride when Africa plowed into the eastern shore of North America, which, as you might imagine, wrinkled things up something fierce. Everything got folded up and pleated and shoved around, and then eroded, so that now you can find wildly different kinds of deep, rich soil in close proximity: sandstone ridges proud with pines right next to limestone soils sprouting the finest

hardwood forests anywhere, everything imaginable growing side by each.

It's just an accident of plate tectonics that the whole series of ridges and valleys runs north-south. Shitty arrangement if you're an American pioneer with your heart set on going west and displacing natives, but terrific if you're a northern species trying to contend with the ice ages. If an ice sheet is bearing down on you, it's an easy slide south down the valleys. If it retreats, you can go back, or you could just pop up-mountain and hang out in the coolth. By the time the ice ages petered out, all kinds of plants and animals had migrated to the southern Appalachians and found a home somewhere in the rumpled landscape.

The festival is in the New River Gorge area. Our pioneers named the river New because it just sort of showed up without being formally introduced on any of their maps, but it is not only not new, it's, like, the third oldest river in the world. There's a crazy amount of water in these hills. Bright, fresh water. Pure treasure.

One of the draws of this place for a birder is the fact that a whole sparkle-box of warblers wants to come here for Spring Break to get lucky. They're all dressed up in their finest and they're singing their fuzzy little hearts out and they're horny and they don't care who's watching, evidently. They've flown their tiny fannies all the way here from south or central America, hundreds of miles, and in many cases they have flown directly to the same tree they were in last year. Sometimes the tree isn't there. Sometimes the forest isn't there.

Sometimes the mountain isn't there.

Sometimes the whole damn range is gone. Sadly, some of the bits that got folded up in the mountains are fossilized peat bogs--coal--and the easiest way to get at it, in order to burn it all up, is to blow up the mountains and shove their carcasses into their own valleys. Sure, it's like doing neurosurgery with a broadaxe, but it's weirdly efficient, if you don't give a damn about water, or plants, or animals, or life in general. Or the future.

Charleston citizens were rightfully incensed early this year when a chemical used in coal processing ruined their drinking water. Where, they demanded, was the government entity responsible for keeping their water safe? Many of those same people have spent years fighting those same government entities because if they were truly allowed to safeguard the environment, there wouldn't be any mountaintop removal coal mining at all. And folks here want those jobs. They're justifiably proud of the generations of miners who have all worked a hell of a lot harder than any of those hippies trying to shut them down. And for all the natural treasure surrounding them, they don't have a Plan B. Coal mining is it.

Could be there won't be much more mountaintop removal in Appalachia, but  it won't be because the EPA finally did their job. It will be because the coal companies have figured out they can get the stuff out cheaper in Wyoming. And they don't give a damn about the miners left stranded. They never have. Not any more than they care about the salamanders, or their own grandchildren.

Thirty Inches. Or So They Say.

In the last week no fewer than five friends have sent me the same article about the penis snake that someone found in the Amazon. I'd like to think they sent it to me because I am a curious soul, although my mother might have had an entirely different take on it. From the photographs it appears that the penis snake in question is thirty inches long, in a relaxed state.

It is appropriate to send a photograph like that to me because I am a certified member of the Love Generation. We in the Love Generation liked to express ourselves with anything we had that could jiggle or flop out, and as a result have probably seen more than our share of genitals. In the early seventies I engaged with enough penises to come to a few conclusions, among them that in fact size does matter, at least at the extremes. I still wonder about the well-being of a fellow I was briefly acquainted with who had to hunt around in his pants for his, and who occupied crevices with all the subtlety of a dime in the sofa cushions.

Photo by Linda Freedman

We called ourselves the Love Generation in order to set ourselves apart from our parents who, having suffered through the Great Depression and fought a great war, settled down to the soulless work of maintaining a home and nurturing children and sending them to college and otherwise demonstrating no aptitude for love at all, at least as we celebrated it, lying around with our attractively taut skin in a pile of tits and daisies and penises and doing as little work as possible. We were all about love, right up until we could get T-bonds at 18%.

Mom captioned this "Mary after a salamander"

At any rate, my reaction to the 30-inch penis snakes that were filling my inbox should have been entirely predictable to those who know me. "That," I said immediately, "is not a snake, but a caecilian." My familiarity with caecilians is, in fact, my most distinguishing feature. I have known about caecilians since I did a report on amphibians in the fifth grade. Then as now, I was into salamanders, but was encouraged to do wider research, and that is how I came to know that there are four kinds of amphibians: your frog, your toad, your salamander, and somebody else's caecilian. You don't run into caecilians all that much, and when you do, you're likely to mistake them for worms. They're blind, they're legless, they poke around in holes in the ground, and quite frankly they are not as attractive as the other members of the class. But they are more member-like.

The particular caecilian currently making the rounds on the internet is probably not new to science at all, but has risen to prominence because of its value in spacing out the cat videos. It has been named, of course. Something about finding a 30-inch penis makes people want to plant a flag.

In any case, this was not a recent discovery, but several months old. Whoever located the penis snake in the bottom of a drained lake evidently decided to sit on it for a while.

Embryonic Glory

Photo by Nina Harfman

My recent musings in which I implied that salamanders are the crown of Creation were not meant to state anything that wasn't already obvious. I mean, look at them. But it got me to thinking about a scientific maxim I learned in college: ontology recapitulates phylogeny. It's a dense phrase. It is, of course, designed to make people feel stupid, then defensive, then irritated at smartypants elites, then prone to making snide references to Obama and his "faculty lounge" as though educated people should be scorned, and before you know it they've voted in a bunch of scoundrels wholly devoted to getting themselves and their friends rich enough to buy out God. So probably the phrase should be retired.

Photo by Nina Harfman

But what it means is pretty cool. The idea is that in the course of developing from egg to embryo to fully-realized critter, we exhibit the stages of our own evolution. We start out sort of wormy, then begin to sprout the accoutrements of our species, reabsorbing our tails and fattening our heads and whatnot. Mom's a little uncomfortable in the second trimester when we go through the triceratops phase, but things smooth out. It's a very attractive notion. It was first proposed by Ernst Haeckel who drew a picture of the various embryonic stages, pointing out the early salamander. That's the hook, right there--who wouldn't want to claim a salamander in her heritage? I've noticed that most people who have looked into their own genealogy have been able to trace back to Charlemagne at some point. We like to think well of ourselves. This just ups the ante.

Trouble is, apparently it's not true. I am old enough to have learned it in school, but it's not true. I also remember looking at a world map in fifth grade and all of us kids pointed out what is perfectly obvious: it looks like the Americas had somehow split off from Europe and Africa. We got on our tiptoes and reached up to trace the map, our voices rising in excitement. The teacher smiled at us indulgently and shook her head and began talking about our delightful imaginations and segued right into something about Santa Claus that we also didn't want to know.

So she was wrong on two points, if you include Santa. But that's science for you. We don't always get things right, but eventually the weight of evidence is brought to bear, and minds are changed. Sometimes it takes a while, because scientists are human too, and they see what they want to see.

Photo by Nina Harfman

That's one of the differences between science and religion, at least the ones that purport to know something. It's hard to knock a good religious story off stride. Once we've got a good narrative going, we don't really want to examine it too closely. An Iroquois succumbing to deadly curiosity could march all the way around to the bottom of the world and back around to the top and approach the shaman and say, "you know? I checked, and the world really isn't balanced on the back of a turtle after all," and that will be the last sound you hear before the thunk of his severed head hitting the ground. For a lot of recorded history, curiosity killed a lot more than cats.

But I'm a curious soul, and I have to go where that leads me, rather than where I want it to. I'm really sorry I didn't get to spend a fetal week as a salamander, but that's life.

All the splendid portraits in this post were made by Nina Harfman over at Nature Remains. She's a great photographer with some sweet subject matter and she's pretty dang limber, too.

God Should Have Quit On The Fifth Day

Science has been unable to pinpoint which day of the week God created man, but for sure it was after he created salamanders, which showed up mid-afternoon of the fifth day. That was a barn-burner of a day for God, and he was justifiably proud, and probably went a little manic there for a while until he got some mud and made a man out of it, and after that he had to rest up. The book says "rest up," but really, he probably realized he needed to put the brakes on and think about what he'd done, because he'd totally overshot. It happens. Creative types frequently come up with their masterpiece early on and then spend the rest of their lives trying to replicate their success, and it never works.

"Day" is probably not meant to be taken literally, because God is more poetic than that, and bigger in general, with much longer days and a much greater imagination than us little mud-cakes he slapped out on the sixth day. So the salamander sort of worked things out on his own, with one great idea after another. There he was in the ocean, where things are constantly trying to make a snack out of him, and so he got closer and closer to shore, rolling his eyes around in alarm, until at one point there they were--his eyes--right on top of his head. Whoa! Genius. He could stay underwater where the oxygen was, and still see everything above the water. Like the land. Which, as far as he could see, contained nothing that wanted to snack on him. At that point there wasn't much more to do but fiddle with the flippers and do some push-ups and before you knew it, the first salamander hitched up on shore, where he grew the biggest and nicest smile anyone ever had before or since, and why not? He'd gotten everything just right. Lo, he was very good. And so he took the entire kit, handsome smile and all, right through to modern times, with barely an adjustment.

It might seem far-fetched about the eyes rolling around on the face, but it happens. Even today, flatfishes start out swimming sideways like regular fish with eyes on either side, and then one of their eyes migrates around to join the one on the other side, and then they drift to the bottom of the sea and blend in, with their eyes on top checking things out. It isn't the Mozart Requiem but it's still pretty cool. The eyes never look quite even, but it's the best they can do, having traveled around the side of the fish. And so you see this sort of thing in Nature all the time: halibut. Flounder. Shannen Doherty.

When God came up with the man, he told him to have dominion over every living thing, which was a big mistake, if you'll pardon my saying so. Sure, you're tired, you've worked hard, and it's tempting to just tell the kids to take care of everything, but that's how you get mud tracked in the house and candy for dinner and the credit card gets run up and all the forests turn to desert and someone cranks the heat up to high so they can sit around in their underwear all winter. It's not responsible. It's not all bad, but you're going to run through a hundred years of oligarchs and Republicans for every Mozart that shows up.

I have the good fortune to know people who do know their proper place in the world, and that place is chest-deep in a cold bog in February. Yes, the regional government Metro has sent out its intrepid Frog Warriors again this year to get a rough count of amphibian egg masses, so we can see if we've done a good job restoring wetlands to what God had in mind in the first place. It's an honor and a privilege to bear witness to the single greatest feat any critter has ever accomplished, something humans couldn't do in their wildest dreams: making new salamanders. No wonder they're still smiling.