Awhile ago, I wrote how the words aloha and mahalo are “the most common Hawai‘ian words in the language. It’s a long, long drop to number 3. Wear your parachute.”

I have a candidate for no. 3. Both because of the increasing frequency of its use in English and because, like aloha and mahalo, it is at grave risk of becoming a “throwaway”.

The word is kokua. It’s a verb, and means “to give generous, self-sacrificial, non-self-aggrandizing help, support, assistance”. It appears most often in the phrase “Please kokua”, which means “Please, be a good neighbor/citizen” and do whatever civic-minded thing the person or organization that used the phrase is about to tell you to do. “Flush the toilet”, or “put your cell phone on ’silent’ during the concert”, or “buy Girl Scout cookies”. That sort of thing.

It also shows up in the phrase “Kokua alert”, which is a call from the members of Group A to give generous, self-sacrificial assistance to the cause of beating the snot out of Group B.

Your Amoeba had the second usage rubbed in his face pseudopodia today (31 March 2009), when colleagues sent around an inflammatory Kokua Alert from environmentalists, calling on people to stop what they perceive as a predatory assault on their turf. Specifically, a possible attempt by the Hawai‘i State Legislature to suspend some environmental funding as part of their desperate attempt to balance the State’s books without throwing half of the State’s citizens out of work and murdering the rest with taxes.

Now, as an environmental scientist, I am, by profession and by predilection, sympathetic to those who call for the responsible management of our natural resources. I would be more sympathetic still if more of those who make such calls were willing to practice what they recommend. But let that be for now. Because, as a scientist, I have a more pressing problem. My kokua goes to those who have facts behind them. Not those who scream at me.

And the authors of the environmental Kokua Alert do a lot of screaming. I was particularly offended by this line:

Legislators are trying to raid every source they can to help balance the budget. But there must be better ways to cut spending and help balance the budget. [emphasis added]

Of course there is, honey. By leaving mine alone and taking his, dammit.

Only one small problem. Everyone else is playing that same game too. And most of them scream louder than you do. And if everybody screams so loud that the Legislature sees only death by cutting anything … well, it’s like how Bill Cosby imagined God, faced with all the gamblers in Vegas calling on the Deity for this roll, and that number, and the other favor, and responding in the only fair and appropriate manner:

BUST EVERYBODY!!

Last I knew, we were facing a global economic catastrophe. Its coming should, I think, have been obvious to anyone who was paying the least attention, but it’s too late to carp about that now. Kokua, to me, under these circumstances, is neither grasping bonuses out of the meltdown nor roasting executives on suspicion of their having received a bonus. It is not about circling the wagons and shooting flaming arrows at everyone else’s circles.

Kokua is, I think, about telling special interests – all of them – to shut the hell up and put their energies towards deciphering, and implementing, what is best for the common good. The rational question, for me, is not why are you treading on my turf, but is the sacrifice of a portion of my turf reasonable, fair, and likely to help turn the tide?

I’m not interested in living in a world where everyone’s yelling Give me mine!, and, as a result, everyone gets busted.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions expressed are mine, as a private citizen.

[Cue James Earl Jones.]

It … has … begun.

Today (28 March 2009), at 8:30 PM at the place where you live, your world will be given over to Him. For an hour, you shall submit to your Royal Master, Phil, The Prince of Insufficient Light!

And you will turn your lights out.

[Cut! Great work as usual, James. See you next year.]

Now, your friendly neighborhood Amoeba is certain that the World Wildlife Fund would be less than pleased to find that its annual Earth Hour publicity stunt promotional gimmick contribution to global environmental awareness has been tied to a figure of the underworld. Even one whose powers are limited to darning you to Heck while totally gagging you with a spoon. Yessir, this here blog would be under the panda’s thumb if the panda ever found out about it. Of course, the panda would have to learn how to use a microscope to do that. Amoebae are pretty small, y’know. So are their blogs.

But, I mean, we gave at the office. Literally. A transformer blew in our building two weeks ago, and we’ve been working in the dark ever since, waiting for the Dolphin Express to tow its replacement over from California. And the dolphins are tired and cranky. That load was heavy, and they’re demanding time-and-a-half, or some tourists are going to get seriously splashed at Sea Life Park. We’ve paid our kilowatt dues already, man.

Besides. There’s a reason why the toes complain when you try to walk through your house at midnight without flipping a switch, Bill:

No. Turn the light on. Turn the light on, will you please? We’re not going through this again.

Bad things happen when you turn the lights out. There are table legs out there, waiting to destroy your toes. There are chicken hearts out there (thub-dub, thub-dub, thub-dub), waiting to destroy New York!

Worst of all, there are zealots out there, waiting to destroy the corporate world by getting the citizens of the planet to pull the plug on them!!

Or so they think. That laughter you hear is from the corporate executives rolling on the floor.

“You morons!”, they cry when they get their breath back. “You think your puny little demonstration means anything? OK, it’ll put a few bucks in your buckets. We’ll grant you, it’s not the worst ad campaign we’ve seen from a pack of rookies. But ‘the will of the people?’ Give us a break!

“Check on the power demand next week at this time, next month, next Christmas. Especially next Christmas. We listen to the real will of the people. And that means neon Santas, idiots, not people stubbing their toes on their way to the bathroom so they can save whales they’d never get to see if they didn’t have power for their televisions.

“And what if they did do as you say? Haven’t you been paying attention to the real news lately? About how lessening demand for goods and services, including energy products, is causing businesses to go under? The word depression mean anything to you cretins? You wildlife types want to get labelled as the rich snotty guys who threw millions of people out of work for the sake of a damned panda, we’re more than happy to help. And good riddance to bad rubbish.”

Bill Cosby was in the middle of telling his version of the Chicken Heart story, in character as a five-year-old kid, when he abruptly stepped out of character to announce to the audience:

I was dumb enough to do whatever the radio told me. “Turn your lights … ouuut.” “OK, they’re out. C’mon, scare me.”

And bad things happened. As Cosby’s father related to anybody within earshot.

Hey. Come over here and see my dumb kid. Go on, tell him how you burned up a $100 sofa and broke your father’s arm to save us from that thub-dub, thub-dub …

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

Jeff Masters, co-founder of the Weather Underground weather site and a Ph.D.-holding meteorologist, recently posted a remarkable set of survey results on his blog.

The topic of the surveys was global climate change, and whether humans are responsible for the changes that we are now observing and are predicting (that word again, evolution fans) will occur in the near future.

What the surveys found was that, while 97% of scientists active in climate-change research agree with the premise that human activities are responsible for present-day global climate change, about half of the general public do not agree. Masters and his compadres fret, with good reason, about how difficult it appears to be to get the clear message from the science across to ol’ J. Q.

Maybe I can do just a little bit to help.

As Jeff M. relates in his blog, one of the arguments of the naysayers is “C’mon, you eggheads, give it a rest. No way can we puny humans throw up enough stuff to pollute the whole world!”

In rebuttal, I give you …

Pond scum.

That’s right.  Pond scum.  The slimy green stuff that grows in your swimming pool if you miss a treatment, or on your concrete walkway if you live someplace damp like Seattle in February, just waiting to trip up the letter carrier who’s delivering the legal complaint from when neighbor Rosenberg slipped on the stuff a month ago and scraped the skin off her arm.

Specifically, the kind of pond scum called blue-green algae, or cyanobacteria (in Greek, that means “blue bacteria”).  The pictures show three different kinds.  What’s that?  You didn’t know pond scum came in kinds? How ’bout tens of thousands of kinds (species)?  And counting?

Turns out, cyanobacteria have been around far longer than lawyers.  How long?  How ’bout three billion years, Felix? That’s billion with a B (yes, Mr. Bull, thousand million to you).  They’ve been around so long, the planet was hardly cool enough to hold them. 

Hell, the atmosphere didn’t even have any oxygen yet.  It was all tied up in things like water and carbon dioxide.  The Earth of three billion years ago was a great place to live, if you were a bacterium or a protozoon that grew by fermentation.

Then the cyanobacteria showed up. And they brought their damned photosynthesis with them. Started chewing up the water and carbon dioxide and spewing out …

Oxygen!

Global catastrophe!!

The fermenters of the early Earth didn’t exactly have the option of going to their local health supplement stores and stocking up on antioxidants. Maybe the stores had all closed in a global economic downturn that coincided with the climate change caused by the oxygen pollution. Whatever. They died, or they evolved to tolerate, and eventually make use of, the oxygen. And the world was forever changed.

Right now, the Earth’s atmosphere contains about 20% oxygen. Most of the scientists whose work I know think that the Earth’s atmosphere reached approximately this oxygen level a billion years before present. Make that Before Present. Just in case anybody from the Geologists Union happens to read this. Anyway. This was long before there were any trees to save (they started showing up around 300 million years ago, or, in geological time, maybe last week or thereabouts).

Think about it. If a skinny layer of pond scum can do all this, what about us with our cars, and our power plants, and our jetliners, and our farting cows, and …

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2009 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions expressed are mine, as a private citizen.

Yes, again with the reposts. This one from Felloffatruck Publications on 3 December 2007.

The greenies will be furious about this. Already are, those that know about it. But this move has been in the cards for a long time. And let’s face it, no one, including the greenies, really cares a whit about endangered species. They’ve been political footballs since before somebody figured out that making pigskin hurts pigs, and designed replacements manufactured from petroleum … (oops). If we actually paid attention to what’s needed to keep species from going extinct …

======================

Awhile ago (I’d, ah, rather not put a number on that), I was talking with a scientific colleague about conservation. Specifically, about the conservation of living species. About the scientific rationale for the money that goes into publicly and privately sponsored programs to keep things like the furbish’s lousewort from going extinct. Or the New Zealand black robin, which, thanks to a significant outpouring of funds and human energy, and the reproductive prowess of two of the five(!) surviving birds, had just been saved …

“For what?” my colleague snapped.

“Whaddaya mean, ‘what?’”, I gasped, thinking that my colleague’s soul had suddenly been snatched away, and I was talking with the shade of a man who would have shot the last six passenger pigeons for his taxidermy shop.

“What are we going to do with it?” he shot back. “It’s a tiny, basically flightless bird that nests on the ground and couldn’t recognize a cat or a rat if its life depended on it. And there are cats and rats everyplace now. Its habitat is gone. When a species loses its place to live, and can’t adapt to a new one, it goes extinct. Species without places to live have been going extinct for billions of years. Except we saved this one. So what are we going to do with it?”

He had a point. A good point. And when I mentioned it, he, being a gentleman, refrained from asking me whether it was really that conspicuous.

He reminded me of tropical rainforests, which have more species per square metre than anywhere else on earth. (No jokes about round meters, please, and kindly keep your stinky square feet to yourself. Must be hell, trying to stand and walk on those things.) Lots of people talk about trying to save tropical rainforest species. All those parrots, and orchids, and gaudy frogs, and fish that look like they’re trying to be neon lights.

But once you’ve got one saved, what are you going to do with it?

Making a living as a species in a tropical rainforest isn’t exactly sunset on the lanai of your beachfront cottage, sipping mai tais and watching the surf. It’s more like the 17th floor of a Waikiki hotel at the height of tourist season. It’s crowded in there, man. Not to mention noisy. And with all that competition for space and food, you have to be pretty savvy, not to mention creative, to keep your room and still have a few bucks in your pocket for dinner.

For example. There’s a group of orchids in tropical rainforests (and some other places) that has figured out a way to keep unwanted bugs off its flowers. Now, keeping unwanted bugs off your flowers is not a trivial matter. Unwanted bugs might eat the flower outright, or steal the pollen or the nectar. This is not the way to go about ensuring that you will have descendants to argue over the provisions of your will.

So these orchid flowers look just like wasps. Female wasps, no less. They even smell like female wasps. Naturally, the only things that will have anything at all to do with the flowers are male wasps. Which, um, try to do them. But instead of sticking anything, they themselves get stuck.

You think I’m kidding?!?

This gets crazier. Say you have one orchid species, which is [ahem] visited by one wasp species. But over time, this species develops two populations, one living on mountainsides and the other by the shores of the lowland lakes. The flowers of these two populations start to differ from each other. So much so that populations of wasps start preferring to visit one or the other. Sooner or later, the wasps from the mountainsides will stop visiting the flowers by the lakesides, and vice versa. The result is two species of orchids. And two species of wasp.

This kind of thing goes on all the time in a tropical rainforest. Species using the subtlest of clues to differentiate themselves from one another, and dragging other species that are dependent on them along for the ride. It makes the rainforest a grand biodiversity engine, creating species far faster than it destroys them.

Until someone comes along with bug spray. Maybe bug spray is not such a big deal in a nice North American field of daisies. Any old bug can fertilize a daisy. Hell, most daisies will fertilize themselves. Now you know, temperate North American / European homeowner, why the battle for the front yard always seems to wind up Dandelions 1, Lawn 0. But in a tropical rainforest, where everything’s a specialist that’s dependent on everything else, and has evolved that way over millions of years of the kind of species splitting I described for the wasp orchids, a generalized insecticide could wipe out a hundred species of pollinating insects. Which will wipe out a hundred species of plants wholly dependent on those insects for pollination. Which will wipe out other species dependent on the existence of those plants for food or shelter.

Which can turn a lush tropical rainforest into a desert virtually overnight. Sure, you might save some species out of that rainforest. But what will you do with them? You wish to spend the rest of your life pretending to be a male wasp?

Now, if you thought I got started on this subject because I just returned from a field trip to a coral reef and I’ve got species on the brain, you’d certainly have reason to think so. And you’d be wrong. What happened was, I was reading an article in the newspaper about how the U. S. Government needed to spend money on somethingorother. And I was thinking “Fine. And the cash for this is coming from where? Wouldn’t it be nice if Our Elected Representatives could train themselves to ask on our behalf, We can’t have this $X budget item unless we can subtract $X from the budget someplace else?“

And then I realized. Our Elected Representatives can’t do this. They try it, they’ll get their bums tossed out onto the Mall. Each and every pot of government money, and private profit, is an island of resources, each with its own community that has come to depend upon that island. And none of those islands can be touched, less worse befall.

Y’see, gone are the days when the same man could clear the back 40; hunt, kill, dress, cook, and serve the venison lurking around his farm; bathe and change the baby; read Shakespeare at the grange hall on Wednesday night (Saturday night being reserved for the tavern). Now we’re all specialists, each with our role. Like standing in an upscale shopping mall, day after day, hawking wind spinners to the promenaders in Waikiki. Each new niche increasingly dependent on its neighbors, its supporters, its competitors.

Which is all fine. Until there’s a plague of beasts. Lions, perhaps. Or geckos. Or transformers . Who knock out the bottom of the deck of cards and send the whole house crashing in upon itself. Leaving only rubble, and then lone and level sands. My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings …

Perhaps you can save a windspinner out of the rubble. But what would you do with it?

Let us hope that, despite the thunder on the horizon, tonight, the lion remains asleep.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

We went to the beach.

We spread our towels in the sand.  We walked down to the water.  We discussed the incredible turquoise water — just like in the travel brochures.

The water was warm and wonderful.  Waves crested to white caps and broke around our feet.

I waded deeper into the water.  A wave swept over my head and I rode it to the beach, laughing all the way.  I did this again and again — OC did it even more.

We laughed and splashed and giggled as the waves tumbled us around.  After awhile we began to feel the sun and decided we’d had enough tropical rays on our lily-white skin.  We showered in the outdoor fountain (built for that purpose) and headed home.

At the apartment complex we decided, since we  were already wet, to pause at the pool for a couple of quick laps in fresh water and a soak in the jacuzzi.   The pool was much cooler then the ocean and we quickly began to shiver.  The jacuzzi, normally too warm to even contemplate, felt great.

Finally, exhausted but relaxed, we headed for our own unit.   As OC parked the car I thought about gathering our beach gear and making the climb to the third floor.  I figured OC must have been at least as tired as I was because even after the car shut off he didn’t move.  I turned my head toward him on the seat and said, “I am two too tired.”

He turned his head toward me and queried, “Bicycle or motorcycle?”

The big news here in Honolulu right now, almost as big as the start of the football season (just what this place needs: a nationally-ranked college football team), is the brand spanking new, big, fast, and cheap Superferry service that you … um … can’t take to the neighboring islands of Maui and Kaua’i right now.

Why not? Well, the environmentalists are screaming “foul”, and that doesn’t mean they’ve made a sighting of the rare native Hawai’ian goose. A hundred and forty million dollars of taxpayer money, they holler ($40 million of it from a Federal grant), and nobody bothered to file an Environmental Impact Statement?? They got a judge on Maui to agree with them and file an injunction barring the Superferry people from landing the boat there. On the very day it was supposed to make its first voyage with paying customers, no less. It never left the docks in Honolulu. I’m sure that did wonders for the Superferry company’s stock price.

The protesters on Kaua’i, lacking judicial sympathy, took their case to the streets – or, more precisely, to the beach. The boat actually sailed to Kaua’i, with a passel of fare-paying people and cars, but it didn’t land on Kaua’i because it couldn’t plow a path through all the people swimming in front of the dock carrying picket signs. Even the Coast Guard hasn’t figured out a way to clear them away. They could, I suppose, declare them all terrorists and ship them to Gitmo, but they haven’t. Some Republican trusty must have IMed the Pentagon with a warning that Hawai’i is close enough to seceding from the Union and restoring the Hawai’ian monarchy as it is. That’s a public relations hit not even Karl Rove could … no, wait, he’s gone now, isn’t he? Hmmm …. I reckon, right now, there are a couple of Washington, DC manager types (see “$40 million Federal grant”, supra) who can’t for the life of them turn the air conditioning in their offices down low enough.

What I’d like to know is, where were all these environmental protesters in 2003 when we needed them? Maybe if we’d called it “Operation Iraqi Albatross” …

So what are these people complaining about? The usual suspects.

Pollution! Bogus. B O Gus. The guy should bathe more regularly. As if the Superferry would contribute more grime per passenger than the Boeing jets that are landing on these islands now.

Damage to coral reefs! Riiight. They should have thought of that before they ripped up thousands of hectares of reef to build the dock and dredge the channel. The damage’s been done … Besides, the worst damage to coral reefs is coming from the greenhouse gases that are being spewed by (see) those damned jets.

Invasive species! Please. As if this isn’t going to happen with all the commercial planes, and private planes, and private boats, that are already trafficking between the islands? Unless you shut them down too, you’re not going to have much luck keeping out the verminous wildlife …

Oh. Wait. I forgot the ones on two legs. My bad …

Y’see, we live in a place called Wai’anae. The slums of O’ahu. Yes. Hawai’i has slums. Not exactly obvious from the travel brochures, now is it? Well, we got ‘em. Along with the racial prejudice that goes with ‘em. “Don’t go to Wai’anae”, we were told. On the campus of the University of Hawai’i. “Don’t go to Wai’anae, you’ll never see a white face.”

Yeah, well, so far all we’ve seen are the most open, honest, and friendly people, of all colors, on this whole island. Sure, it’s a little grimy in spots. Working the real jobs for what the fancy people in their stretch Lexuses are prepared to let slip from their chromium-steel fingers will do that to a person.

It’s also the only place on the island where one can rent any kind of domicile for less than the proverbial king’s ransom.

Or, it was.

Y’see, it’s been discovered now. People are increasingly prepared to wear the hour-plus-long commute to the city, and the gang sign on street corners at home, for the privilege of having a little more space to live in than a tinned sardine, for less than the price of the caviar from an extinct species.

And the locals know it.

Properties that just a year or so ago housed a laboring family for $300 a month are now being rented to migrating professionals for $1500. The laboring families? They live on the beach. Or they did, until the Governor signed an executive order putting a stop to it, and claimed dictatori… er, special powers to ensure that these people stay off the beach. We can’t be making the tourists nervous …

I don’t know where they’re taking the beach people. I’m not sure I wish to know. Because Wai’anae was the last place on O’ahu where you could get a patch of sand for less than four figures monthly. Everything not prohibited, or vertical, is taken. There’s no place else to go. Except a boat. Or a blimp.

Or Kaua’i. But you couldn’t get to Kaua’i unless you were one of those fancy people who can afford plane fare. Which adds up real fast if you have to travel often. Like, if you’re commuting.

But the Superferry? Hey, it’s cheap. And you can take your car. It opens possibilities. With rents on O’ahu running at gangland extortion levels, putting up a shack on Kaua’i or Maui and commuting to Honolulu via this big boat starts looking very attractive.

Unless you already live on Kaua’i or Maui and don’t want to have to share your island with any of this verminous O’ahu wildlife. Rich mainland tourists we can take. We’ll take ‘em for all we can. Commuters? Environmental damage!! Get out the protest signs …!

I’m told that, before Captain Cook came along with his ships full of verminous wildlife, whose vermin decimated the Hawai’ian peoples (along with the peoples of just about every other place they visited), there were about 900,000 Polynesians living on O’ahu. About the same population as is on the island today. In Polynesian history and cultural identity, pride of place is taken by the waka (in Hawai’ian, wa’a), or ocean-going canoes, which set out from Home (literally, Hawai’i), probably early in the second millenium of the Common Era, to colonize practically the whole Pacific Ocean, from Easter Island in the East to New Zealand in the West. The wa’a set out to find new lands, the old lands having no space remaining but grass shacks in Wai’anae being rented out at gangland extortion levels. And they had to be new lands, as in “uninhabited” – for if they landed on an inhabited place, they would be driven off. Or, invited to (ahem) dinner …

The Superferry is a modern wa’a. Except that it’s being driven off, not by spears and haka, but by injunctions and protesters screaming Save the whales!!

But I suppose I shouldn’t be too harsh. After all, the activists on Maui and Kaua’i who are creating so much trouble for the Superferry are, I am certain, genuinely concerned about the environment.

Theirs.

- O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

He said: Seaweed.

She said: See! Weed!

“What’d she say, dude? Was that something about weed?“

“Yeah, dude. The wet stuff. The kind that goes with the water on your brain. Shut up and listen for once. You want to scare this Quilldancer away? OC might consider that a delete key offense.“

“Urk! OK, dude, OK …”

She said: My roommate is a scientist. He is in love with seaweed. This is what I knew about seaweed before spending this summer in Friday Harbor with O.C. — “It grows in the sea, right?” But now I know a lot more.

She said: This is Bullwhip Kelp. The leaves are at the top. The long cord, or bullwhip, attaches it to the sea floor. Near the top a large Bullwhip is a couple of inches in diameter and with a little judicious knife work, OC can turn one of them into a playable trumpet.

He said: B+. Bull Kelp (Nereocystis luetkeana), not Bullwhip Kelp, Indiana. Only found on the Pacific side of North America. The leafy bits are called laminae (you can’t call them “leaves”, that’s a botany card violation), the cord is the stipe that connects the laminae to the holdfast. The whole thing can be 30 feet long. And they’re annuals, all gone by December. My Yamaha plays better.

She said: I’m so glad I don’t have a botany card.

He said: What do you call that thing you got from Sears, then?

“Man, dude, he got her that time!“

“Chill, dude, willya?“

She said: This is Sugar Kelp. It is full of sucrose and has a Japanese cousin named kombu that is made into candy.

He said: Nice work. Though the sweetness doesn’t come from sucrose. This alga grows on both coasts of North America, in western Europe, and Japan. It’s made into other stuff, like soup stock, as well as candy. Though it’s got the scientists in a bit of a lather. It used to be called Laminaria saccharina, but the DNA boys now insist that it be called Saccharina latissima instead. I’m sure the farmers have been yelling at the scientists. They don’t like name changes.

“I don’t care what they call it, dude! I ain’t eatin’ none!”

“Me neither, dude.”

“You agree with me?!?”

“First time for everything. Don’t get used to it, Scarecrow.”

She said: This is Turkish Towel. It is very rough and bumpy. I would not recommend drying with it. It would scratch a bit, and perhaps leave you even wetter then you were to begin with.

He said: No, I wouldn’t either. Besides which, it’s awfully small for a towel. Exasperatingly small, even. Which is not why they call it Chondracanthus exasperatus, but that’s good enough for right now. You eat this one too, although not much of it because it’s not something that can be easily farmed or harvested. There are similar algae elsewhere that are easier to get at. It’s a source of carrageenan, which is in all sorts of stuff like …

She said: Hey! That’s in my ice cream!

“That’s in my ice cream?!?”

She said: Wait – is there an echo?

He said: No, I didn’t hear anything.

“Didn’t I tell you to chill, dude?!?”

“Back off, dude! I didn’t know ice cream had slime in it!”

He said: It’s in all sorts of stuff besides ice cream, usually as an emulsifier. And it isn’t slimy.

She said: I didn’t say it was. Somebody say it was slimy?

He said: Not unless you’re talking to yourself and don’t know it.

She said: Well, you answered it. You must be talking to yourself.

He said: I would never do that.

Yo. Dudes. Pipe down!!

“Dude! You got a pipe?! Why didn’t you …?”

Ssshh!!

She said [trying valiantly to educate her audience]: This one made OC frown.

He said: Well, it’s a weed.

She said: Huh? But I thought …

“Huh? But I thought …”

He said: What’re you wrinkling your nose at?

She said: I heard that echo again.

He said: What echo?

She said: Never mind. You going to tell me how come this one’s a weed? I thought they all are?

He said: When I stop wondering about your imaginary friends.

She said: My imaginar …?

He said: It’s a weed ’cause it doesn’t belong here. It came over from Japan and is now all over the place on the Pacific coast of North America and the Atlantic coast of Europe. It’s a sargasso weed, Sargassum muticum.

She said [turning back toward her audience]: He took out his pocket lens (magnifying glass, and yes, he carries it everywhere) and examined the offender closely, then he tossed it onto the dock. That surprised me. He had been carefully returning everything to the water. I asked OC if he was saving that seaweed for some reason. He said he was killing it. He’d kill all the ones of this kind if he could.

She said: This is not a seaweed. It’s a sea grass.

“Dude! There’s hope!!”

She said: OC says it is related to the stuff we mow.

“Damn. Never mind …”

She said: Never mind what?

He said: Getting out your lawn mower. We call this stuff “sea grass” (Zostera marina) because it is a real flowering plant, with pollen and seeds and everything. Though the flowers look more like crab claws than daisies. There aren’t many flowering plants in the sea; the algae have been around lots longer, and didn’t exactly leave a lot of room for posies.

She said: This is Garry. Don’t ask me about its name. I didn’t name it. If I had named it, it would be called Elephant Ear or something like that. When OC was holding this up he was telling me about its sex life. I don’t remember much about it except that it really didn’t sound all that exciting.

He said: Sigh. That’s what all the students say. Everybody tells me “sex sells”, but you’d never know it around here.

“You got that right, dude! I ain’t …”

SSSSHHH!!

She said: Gesundheit!

He said: Thank you. This thing’s not called Garry, it’s called Costaria costata and it’s a close relative of that bull kelp. And the sugar kelp too, for that matter. But, like the bull kelp, it’s only found on the Pacific coast of North America.

She said: Didn’t you tell me it was called “Garry something or other”?

He said: I don’t know the Somethingorothers.

She said: What did you tell me this was called?

He said: You mean Agarum? That’s not what this is. You’ve got to understand that what you think you heard was not what I meant. So there.

She said: Are you admitting that the scientist made a mistake?

He said: We’re having steak?

She said: That’s what I thought.

She said: This is Garry’s brother, Larry.

He said: No, it’s Alaria …

She said: That’s what I said. You never listen to me! Larry is very slick and a sort of a slimy fellow. Thankfully OC didn’t tell me anything about Larry’s sex life. [shudder]

He said: Well, you didn’t want to know about Garry’s, either. Same old same old. Slimeballs get the same treatment as the bulls. Or the sugars. And I suppose you won’t want to know that people eat Alaria, right?

“They do?!? Ewww …”

He said: They do. When you live on rocky islands, you get your vegetables, and your vitamins where …

She said: I didn’t say anything.

He said: Did too. You ewwwed at me. I didn’t think you did that.

She said: You’re hearing things.

He said: Now you’re blaming your imaginary friends on me. Sheesh.

She said [trying to ignore his nonsense]: This is Mike. He is a cousin of Larry’s and Garry’s.

He said: No. He’s Turkish.

“Turkish? Where?!?”

“Dude, just shut up. You’ve already made a hash of this conversation, don’t make it any worse. Remember: Command-X.“

“That’s Control-X, dude. How many times …???”

“… does your Vista crash in an hour? It’s a sight to behold, dude.”

She said: Oh, he’s related to the towel? I thought he looked far too different to be a brother. But Mike, Larry and Garry have got to be related because they have all these very un-seaweedy names. (Unseaweedy is a word, right?)

He said: No, that’s unseaworthy. And so’s your logic. Garry and Larry are brown. Mike’s red. In this world, color matters.

She said: So, seaweeds are prejudiced?

He said: Well, I wouldn’t go looking for any orange offspring. You’d be disappointed.

She said: This is Mara. Definitely a relative of Larry’s.

He said: Actually, you’re right. About the relationship, that is, though the name is Desmarestia, and yes I see how you got Mara out of that. Though we didn’t think that Desmarestia was related to the kelps (bull, sugar, etc.), back when I was the age of the Du … er, the students in the class.

“Did he say bullsugar, dude?”

“No, dude, but he might drop you in it any time now.”

She said: Didn’t you tell me that this seaweed manufactures acid?

“Acid? Acid?!? How long you gonna keep holding out on me, OC?? You gonna tell me how to grow this stuff?”

He said: It sure does. Sulfuric acid. I wouldn’t try getting high on it. It’s there to …

She said: Getting high? Who are you talking to??

He said: You. And those imaginary friends of yours. I’m beginning to worry about you. Anyway, the sulfuric acid is there to keep animals from eating this stuff. Sea urchin teeth will literally dissolve if they try to chew on Desmarestia.

She said: Speaking of “dissolved”, if they’re my imaginary friends, why are you talking to them?

He said: I should have known. You always try to blame everything on me. Class dismissed. I’m going to the library.

She said (under her breath as he left the dock): Famous scientist has imaginary friends. I can see the headlines now …

He said: Who said they were my friends?

She said: What?

He said: Nothing …

“Well, dude, that was a fine piece of work. What the hell got into you, anyway?”

“Dude, they were pickin’ on me. Imaginary? Imaginary?? I ain’t flippin’ imaginary!”

“No, dude, you’re virtual. In fact, you’re such a good emulation, you’re virtually an idiot. You damned near fried OC’s hard drive, that’s for sure.”

“Not to mention messing up his connectivity.”

“Yeah, dude. I wouldn’t mention that if I were you.”

It was a rainy Sunday morning. San Juan Island, Washington doesn’t get many cool, damp, gloomy Sunday mornings during August, and this one seemed to have taken even the wildlife off guard.

In the hour after dawn, a young buck deer, its antlers mere buttons, had pressed itself against the windows of our living room, trying to stay dry. It quivered but stood its ground while Quilly approached, to mere inches and a pane of glass away from its overworked snout. It was unwilling to forsake its haven and its chance to browse, from it, the sprouts of the madrone stumps that dotted the slope below our apartment. By mid-morning, however, even that buck had sought better shelter under the douglas firs, and the landscape was left to the fog and mist.

Weather changes in the Puget Sound region are rarely as dramatic as they are further East, with their sharp-edged fronts and drenching, wind-driven downpours driven off by wedges of chilled blue skies. Nevertheless, when the sun finally fought its way through the low clouds early that afternoon, it was as if a computer graphics guru had just restored, at a stroke, all the colors to a grayscale image of a still life.

For still it was, as if the wind itself had caught its breath at the sight of the freshly-illumined landscape.

And crossing that landscape were little puffs of gauze. The color and size of dandelion puffs, they were. Except that they wafted up in the motionless air. And as they rose, they flickered, flickered with the beating of frail wings.

Winged ants.

I followed the flight path back down to the ground, to the madrone stumps that had held the attention of that buck deer in the rainy hours of the morning. One of those stumps was now an insectoid helipad, fully invested with winged ants and wingless in urgent motion, anxious to see the honeymoon flights safely launched. The nervous bustle puzzled me. What, in that bucolic scene, could possibly be signalling, to these ants, a need for haste?

Then the feathered monster appeared.

It was a male Dark-Eyed (“Oregon”) Junco, a miniature among birds but a thrashing troll among the now-panicked six-legged debutantes. At first he flapped among the fliers, snatching and grabbing. Then, just as I had earlier with my eyes, he followed the flights down to their source and landed. The carnage was total. Ants vanished into the bill of the beast until all the winged ones were consumed or, dismayed, had retreated below ground. With the clearing of the feasting table, the junco wandered off.

A few minutes later, another madrone stump a few feet away erupted into flying ants. It almost seemed as if that stump had a sentinel, which waited to sound the “All Clear” until after the junco had gone. Once more the sunlit stillness was criss-crossed with gossamer gauze.

Then, suddenly, the slope was alive with dragonflies.

The junco had been clumsy in the air, missing more insects than it captured. But the dragonflies were precision fliers; one would swoop up from behind and below a flapping ant, and pick it out of the sky as neatly and as efficiently as a magnet scoops up iron tacks. Soon there were more predators on the wing than prey. I found myself cheering on the occasional ant that got close to the trees at the edge of the clearing made when the madrones had been cut down, a year or so ago, and to safety. A few of them made it.

The dragonflies were sated, though, before the second ant colony ran dry, and once more the helipad was bustling.

Only to be disrupted by a foraging junco. A female this time, picking off the would-be departures before they got airborne, just as her presumed partner had done. But unlike her partner, she held most of her prey in her beak. It soon was apparent that there was another party to this arrangement. She flitted off to find it, a fluttering, begging mass of brown in the bushes at the bottom of the hill. A fluttering, begging mass of brown that, incongrously, was almost twice her size …

The junco was feeding a baby brown-headed cowbird.

Cowbirds lay their eggs in the nests of other bird species. The cowbird eggs usually hatch earlier than the eggs that actually belong there, and the young cowbird either kills the other chicks, elbows them out of the nest, or, by grabbing all the food that the parents bring to the nest first, starves them out. Species that are targeted by cowbirds often suffer disastrous declines in numbers, even to the point that they are threatened with extinction. Unless they learn to fight back. Adult juncos will attack any cowbird that they see approaching a junco nest. Other birds will abandon a nest that has a cowbird egg in it, or will destroy the cowbird eggs. Once the egg hatches, however, the cowbird chick becomes a baby like any other, and it must be fed …

The ant supply being finally exhausted, the mother junco and her outsized foster child disappeared into the bushes.

At that moment, a horn sounded. The ferry, with its load of Nigerian oil, Namibian diamonds, Malaysian electronics, Bangladeshi clothing, and well-fed Americans with an obsession for their personal security, was pulling into the dock at Friday Harbor.

  - O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.

As you may know, I’m one of those people who, on occasion, pays attention to things that are written where they’re not supposed to be. Graffiti can give a far more honest appraisal of what a place is like than all the travel posters in the world.

Of course, for this amoeba’s no money, the best graffiti is none at all. Shows that the people of the place have some remaining vestiges of respect for other people, and for property. On that score, the Friday Harbor Labs rates very highly. Mostly wooden buildings, many of which date back to the 1920s, and there’s hardly a scrawl, a scrape, or a spray anyplace.

But in one stall, there’s a shelf which, some years ago, folk began using as a stash for toilet paper. A lot of toilet paper. Which had moved someone to write, in block letters on the rim of the shelf, REMEMBER CONSERVATION?

Those words had been there for years, unmolested. But this year is different. Someone had added to the original slogan, in words that spilled from the rim of the shelf to the adjacent wall, OF MASS.

Someone else had made an effort, only partially successful, to erase the graffiti. The tops and bottoms of the letters still remained, though their middles had all been wiped away. All, that is, except for the last two letters, which were overwritten – replacing the final O and N with S and M.

REMEMBER CONSERVATISM?

And dear Quilly’s been so happy that the Friday Harbor Laboratories are green. Well, they used to be …

- O Ceallaigh
Copyright © 2007 Felloffatruck Publications. All wrongs deplored.
All opinions are mine as a private citizen.