To Hither and Yon

National Geographic April 2016, Part 1

Death, Death, and More Death.

I’m not overly enthusiastic about reading about death. And for this project, I had to slog through, not just one, but two articles about death. If I were less dedicated to my goal of reading everything, I would have just skipped these two articles.

So I’m going to give you a couple of titles, a couple of authors, a couple of photographers, and a quick rant, and then we’ll be done with this and move onto the title article on Joel Sartore’s photo ark (which is also tangentially about death — I love posting about death 30 hours before I’m supposed to get on a plane, really, as if flying didn’t make me nervous enough).

First title, author, and photographer, The Crossing, by Robin Marantz Henig, photographs by Lynn Johnson.

Second title, author, and photographer, Where Death Doesn’t Mean Goodbye . . . by Amanda Bennett, photographs by Brian Lehmann

And now the rant. The Crossing is about new developments in science where people who were previously thought to be beyond resuscitation were resuscitated (frequently seemingly no the worse for wear). One of the examples they give is Jahi McMath, who, we are told, “experienced a catastrophic loss of oxygen during a tonsillectomy.” If this is the quality of research that Marantz Henig put into this article, then I’m suspicious about the whole thing.

McMath was obese and had sleep apnea. This caused a sort of feedback loop effect where her sleep apnea seemed to be making her gain weight, and her weight problems were exacerbating her weight problems. Finally, in 2013, (and by some accounts, a little reluctantly), the doctor in question operated on her. The operation was not a simple tonsillectomy. The doctors completely resectioned her throat. They removed her adenoids, her tonsils, and I think they did something to her uvula. Looking it up, I see that they resectioned her uvula and her pharynx as well. This is an extensive surgery, and not one to be undertaken lightly.

And McMath made it through safely. I can’t find the reference now, but I seem to recall that she was out of recovery and in ICU (because it was extensive surgery) and was talking with her family when she began to bleed from the incision site (which was in her throat). Then she went into cardiac arrest and by the time they got her heart started, there was no sign of brain activity. The State of California declared her dead. Her mother disagreed with the state because McMath’s heart hadn’t stopped when her neurological functions did and got them to release McMath to her and they moved her to New Jersey, where she has been on a ventilator and a feeding tube ever since.

So it wasn’t just a tonsillectomy (though her tonsils were removed during the surgery), she didn’t have the event during the surgery itself, and there was a bit more going on than just a loss of oxygen.

Next up: More San Antonio parks and then a man who is trying to get a photograph of every existing species of animal.

We’re Back from Chicago

We actually got back late Thursday night, but I had to (a) pick my cat up from boarding early yesterday and (b) work until pretty late last night, so this is the first time I’ve had it together enough to post.

The Picasso, Chicago, 2016 — An untitled sculpture by Pablo Picasso, in Daley Plaza downtown. Chicagoans just call it “The Picasso.”

What I noticed about this photo of the Picasso, for what it’s worth, is how low my perspective is. I mean, I know that I’m short, but somehow I always imagined that I was seeing the Picasso from something like the same angle that it’s usually photographed in, and not from an angle where I would be looking up her nostrils if her nose were three-dimensional (and “her” is correct — the Picasso is, in fact, a sculpture of a woman).

We spent most of the time in downtown Chicago on this trip, but we did go out into the suburbs once, to visit the Chicago Botanic Garden in Glencoe. The trip was only four days, but we visited four museums (the Art Institute of Chicago, the Field Museum, the Adler Planetarium, and the Shedd Aquarium) and three parks (Millennium Park, Grant Park (which we actually visited in two chunks — we walked down the east side of Columbus Drive on our way to the Museum Campus and back up the west side of Columbus Drive on our way back to our hotel), and Lincoln Park (while we were there, we visited Lincoln Park Zoo). I also dragged Alex to some landmark buildings, including but not limited to the Marshall Field and Company Building (which currently houses a Macy’s), the Chicago Cultural Center, the Chicago Board of Trade building, and the Water Tower. I suggested that Alex and I go into Water Tower Place (a shopping mall across the street from the Water Tower), if only for the air conditioning, but he didn’t want to.

I took over 600 photos and saw two childhood friends while I was there. It’d been six years since my last visit and I don’t want that much time to pass again. One of my friends and I almost didn’t recognize each other, it’d been so long since we’d seen each other. I’ve started a fund to save up for another trip back. I’m thinking that we may rent a car for part of the next trip (which looks like it’ll be late in 2018 or early in 2019) because I’d like to take Alex to see the Black Hawk statue in Lowden State Park and Grosse Point Lighthouse in Evanston, both of which would be much easier to visit with a car.

2016 Vacation: Great Salt Lake State Park, Magna, Utah

I try to visit all of the famous bodies of water that I can make it to when I travel. In 2014, Alex and I went way out of our way to see (and for me to dabble my feet in) the Mediterranean. So, I had to at least see the Great Salt Lake. I had two choices of destinations to visit the lake, Great Salt Lake State Park and Antelope Island.

Antelope Island looked as though it was more “on our way” than Great Salt Lake State Park, since it’s northwest of the city and we’d be traveling northward on our way to Yellowstone, but when I put them both into Google Maps, I realized that Great Salt Lake State Park was actually significantly closer, because to get to Antelope Island, you actually have to go north and then back south again. So, since we were facing a seven-hour trip (six hours if we were going direct, but we were planning to stop in Promontory to visit the Golden Spike National Monument), we opted for the easier-to-access destination.

The Great Salt Lake, 2016. The water was particularly low this year.

So we headed out. After a brief stop at the store for provisions, we hit Interstate 80 towards Magna. It turned out that Great Salt Lake State Park was probably the better choice for two reasons aside from the shorter commute time.

First, I had read about Saltair, a Victorian-era resort where Mormon dating couples could go swimming and dancing without worrying about their reputations because there were Mormon chaperones everywhere. I did not realize that Saltair had been in that section of the lake. I say “had been” because the original Saltair was destroyed by a fire in 1925. The building at the exit from Interstate 80 is not exactly where the original Saltair had been; the original was two miles farther east, but it was close enough in my opinion.

The second was the Kennecott Utah Copper smelting plant, which is pretty much directly across the Interstate from the park. I had noticed the smokestack (the tallest man-made structure in Utah) from the air, and if we had gone to Antelope Island I may never have known what that smokestack belonged to).

I had read that, due to the brine shrimp and brine flies, it wasn’t really advisable to swim in the water, but when we arrived, I saw people in bathing suits rinsing off under a hose. And I thought, “I’m going to touch that water.”

We nosed around in the visitor’s center for a while and then headed outside. The lake was, well, a lake. There is a lovely little island not too far from shore, and there were a *lot* of brine flies on the shore. There are only two things that live near that water — brine shrimp in the water and brine flies near the shore. However, the brine flies attract (1) migratory birds and (2) spiders. I like spiders, so that part was cool for me.

I didn’t swim in the water (I still had a six-hour (it ended up being even longer) drive ahead of me), but I did wade in up to my ankles. The waves made nice Zen-garden-feeling patterns in the sand. I rinsed my feet off under the hose, but still felt like I needed to wash my hands. The restrooms were kind of dark, but seemed clean enough when I was there.

The observation deck is fully ADA-compliant, as are the restrooms, or so the website of the architect who designed them assures me. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a path down to the water that wasn’t rocky, so that seemed off-limits to wheelchair users.

National Geographic May 2013, Part 3

Element Hunters, by Rob Dunn, photographs by Max Aguilera-Hellweg

Element Hunters, aside from the annoying faux-periodic-table font they used for the title (“N,” “H,” and “U” have atomic numbers thank you very much. They don’t need fake ones attached to them by the graphics layout people at National Geographic) has the also-annoying misuse of the word “hunters.” The title makes it sound like the scientists in question are looking for existing elements. They aren’t hunting for elements any more than my cousin used to hunt for poodle puppies (hint: she bred them).

The titular “hunters” are using a cyclotron to throw protons and electrons at each other in an effort to create a new element that will remain stable. So far, they all have so many particles that they are pulled apart after the tiniest fraction of a second. I kind of doubt that we’ll ever find a stable element with that many protons and electrons, but it’s a hobby, I guess.

China’s Grand Canal, by Ian Johnson, photographs by Michael Yamashita

In this article, we travel with Johnson to the city of Jining and then spend two weeks on a barge carrying a load of coal down the canal to the Yangtze. Along the way, we learn the history of the canal, which was begun when Emperor Yang wanted to carry rice from the north to the south. The major rivers of China run east-to-west, so Yang had “a million” people dig a canal running perpendicular to the rivers. The canal used to start at Beijing, but much of the northernmost section is filled in now.

South Texas Destinations: Comanche Lookout Park, San Antonio, Texas

Alex and I went to Comanche Lookout Park a couple of years ago when I was first playing around with the idea of starting a travel blog. San Antonio has such a wealth of parks and I thought that it was a real shame that I never really got out of the Brackenridge/Walker Ranch/Hardberger/Eisenhower/Denman Estate rut that I was in. So I started to research parks and discovered that Comanche Lookout has both geographical and historical interest.

The geographical interest is that Comanche Lookout Park is the fourth-highest point in Bexar County. And since Bexar County is pretty hilly, that means something. The elevation of Comanche Lookout Park is 1,340 feet. That’s nearly 400 feet higher than the very highest point in Cook County.

As to history, the local Native American nations, the Apache and, later Comanche, used the hill as, well, a lookout post, just as the name implies. Later, the Camino Real de los Tejas (not to be confused with the Californian Camino Real), which connected Mexico City to Laredo, San Antonio, and Nacogdoches, Texas went past the hill. That part of the road is known as Nacogdoches Road today. In the 1920s, a man named Edward H. Coppock bought the land that includes Comanche Lookout and he began work on a castle at the top of the hill. He never finished his castle before his death. A later owner razed all but the foundations and the completed tower at the top of the hill. The property was passed from owner to owner for nearly 50 years. The City of San Antonio purchased the parcel in 1994 and converted it into a public park.

Comanche Lookout Park tower, 2014 — The tower at Comanche Lookout Park, 2014

Comanche Lookout Park has 4.55 miles of walking trails and one of those outdoor fitness systems. You know, the “do pullups on this bar,” “hold this bar and do pushups” things. There is a city library on the corner of Nacogdoches and Judson Roads. And, of course, there is the tower (see image), which is surrounded by a fence.

I seem to recall that a large number of the trails are paved, but the path to the top of the hill might be a level 3, and thus unusable by people in wheelchairs without really good upper body strength or a really powerful motorized chair.

I’ve Missed a Couple of Days

I applied for a couple of jobs on a whim and actually ended up with one job interview. I won’t know how I did until sometime next week, but it’s been hard to focus on pretty much anything besides that interview (particularly since I went out and bought a whole new outfit — shoes and everything — for it) in the last few days.

I’ve been thinking about the before and after of our trip to Yellowstone. My checklist included:

Find my ancestor’s baptismal record;
Visiting Temple Square
Seeing the Great Salt Lake
Visiting Golden Spike National Monument
Seeing a bison
Seeing a bear
Walking at least 100 yards from a paved road at Yellowstone
Leaving the path entirely at Yellowstone
Seeing Old Faithful erupt (and recording it if possible)
Visiting the Old Faithful Inn (and eating there if possible)
Visiting Dinosaur National Monument
Seeing the petroglyphs at Dinosaur National Monument
Visiting five different states

And I may have done the first. The record I found was for the correct date and the surname starts with the correct three letters. Unfortunately, as helpful as the people at the Family History Library were, no one there that day spoke Russian.

I did the 7th as a technicality. The park ranger directed us to a path that was fairly well traveled (and thus not terribly likely to end up with us disappearing without a trace or anything) and, as it turned out, 212 yards of it were unpaved. As a result, for 12 yards in the middle of the path, we were technically 100 yards from a paved road. We also made a sharp left into the woods and walked for a total of about a hundred yards, but we had to turn right to get around an obstacle, so we ended up less than 100 yards from the path.

And we got four of our five states in. We never made it to Colorado, since it was really late when we got to our hotel in Vernal and I just didn’t have the energy to drive any longer that night, even if Colorado was only a half hour away. And the next day, we got a later start than I would have liked, so we had to head back to Salt Lake City and didn’t get to go to Colorado that day. But I still got to visit Utah, Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming, so four out of five isn’t bad.

Alex and I leave for Chicago early Monday morning, so I’m going to type up my next National Geographic post tonight or tomorrow and perhaps write up Golden Spike National Monument as well. Those will be my posts for August 8 and 10, and by the 12th we’ll be home.

South Texas Destinations: Cibolo Nature Center, Boerne, Texas

Alphabetically, Brackenridge Park should be the next park up, but I’ve already covered Brackenridge Park here and here and here. So, skipping over Brackenridge, we get Cibolo Nature Center in Boerne, Texas.

We’ve been visiting Cibolo Nature Center since, oh, 2003 or so. I remember visiting it for the first time in the summer, and the sun was beating down on my hair pretty relentlessly (so that leaves out 2002; I didn’t have a whole lot of hair in the summer of 2002, I was still recovering from chemo). After the discomfort of the heat from the sun, I didn’t want to return again until fall. Once we went back, though, it didn’t take long to become one of my favorite parks, despite the half-hour drive it takes to get there.

The land which is now the Cibolo Nature Center was once just the back end of Boerne City Park (despite the name, there actually are other parks in Boerne). Prior to that, the land had been part of the ranch of Dr. Ferdinand Herff. A group formed to protect the section of Cibolo Creek that runs through this section of the park and also to preserve the little bit of wetlands that existed on the site. The city agreed that this was a worthwhile goal and the Cibolo Nature Center was established.

There are three miles of trails in Cibolo Nature Center,around two miles of which are named trails. These include the Marshland Trail, which leads out into the wetlands portion of the park, the Native Texas Prairie Trail, which leads out into the prairie at the center of the park, the Cibolo Creek Trail, which leads along Cibolo Creek, and the Woodlands Trail, which continues out into a wooded area farther along.

The Cibolo Creek Trail made me think of Middle Earth the first time I saw it, and it took me a while to realize why. The mass-market paperback edition of The Hobbit that was popular when I was young had Tolkein’s painting of the barrels with the dwarves in them escaping downstream and the view of the cypresses that line the banks lead to not a terribly different image.

They have at least in the past done controlled burns of the prairie area. This makes sense, because burning is an important part of prairie management. Without periodic burning, trees would eventually take over the land. Anyway, the now-ex, Alex, and I were in the prairie just after a burn once and we found something’s pelvic bones in the field. It seemed awfully small for a deer, but I’m nothing like an expert on osteology. At any rate, we didn’t want to disturb it, so we told one of the employees what we’d seen and where it was.

We had nicknames for most of the parks that we visited while Alex was young. The nickname that we had for for Cibolo Nature Center was “the dinosaur woods.” The “woods” part is pretty obvious, I think. The “dinosaur” part is one of the neatest things about the park. In 1997, there was tremendous flooding in this region. One of the side effects was that dinosaur footprints were exposed by the flooding near Boerne Lake. The city decided to preserve them by paving them over, from what I read, but prior to that, they made a cast of them and put the cast in the Cibolo Nature Center. It’s pretty easy to find the tracks from the parking lot. When you stand in the parking lot, you can see the pavilion (this is also where the restrooms are located). The path kind of skirts the pavilion and heads off to the right (as you look at it). The footprints are along that path.

The Marshland Trail is designed to be wheelchair accessible. The rest of the paths are largely pretty level, but unpaved. The path down to the creek itself is pretty steep and kind of rocky, so I’m not sure about getting too close to the creek in a wheelchair. I can only think of one staircase on the paths, and that leads up the side of the bluff between the Cibolo Creek Trail and the Woodlands Trail.

2016 Vacation: Temple Square, Salt Lake City, Utah

I mentioned back before the trip that I hoped to find the birth record of an ancestor while I was in Salt Lake City. I figured it wouldn’t take that long, but it ended up taking about three hours. Alex is very patient. I may have found the record (we do know that the birth date and the first three letters of the surname match what I know about the ancestor), but it’s in Russian and I don’t speak Russian.

Afterwards, we spent a few hours in Temple Square, which seems much larger than I think it actually is. Officially, Temple Square is ten acres, which is three times the size of Main Plaza here in San Antonio. However, just outside what I think is the official Temple Square is a reflecting pool and then there is another probably ten-acre parcel with other buildings on it. At any rate, the other parcel looks to be the same size as Temple Square.

Since we came in from the Family History Library, we, of course, approached through the Temple Street entrance, in between the Assembly Hall and the Tabernacle. There are so many trees in Temple Square now that the impact of the Tabernacle is somehow lost. I was very taken by the Assembly Hall, though, and took lots of pictures.

We walked around the fence around the Temple (not being Mormon, we didn’t have, erm, a prayer of getting beyond that fence) and discovered a reflecting pool and, beyond that, office buildings for the church, the Joseph Smith Memorial building (which used to be the Hotel Utah) and a fountain (see image). Even farther on, you find the two homes of Brigham Young, the Lion House and the earlier Beehive House, both named for sculptures that are part of their architecture. The Lion and Beehive Houses were designed by the same architect who designed the temple itself.

Salt Lake City Temple and Fountain, 2016 — The front of the Salt Lake City Temple silhouetted behind the fountain, 2016

The temple points “towards Jerusalem,” which means east. I once looked up the shortest possible distance from my home to Mecca and found that I would have to face northeast (more or less), so I suspected that was true of the temple and Jerusalem, as well. And it is. The temple should, technically, face northeast. But that’s not the actually odd part. No, the odd part, to me, at least, is that the temple is on the eastern edge of the square, so that when you approach the temple from the square itself, you are walking up to the back of the building. I wonder how many non-Mormon businesspeople and tourists staying at the Hotel Utah looked out of their hotel room window and had similar thoughts.

2016 Vacation: Pando and Fish Lake, Richfield, Utah

I’m something of a science buff. I’m no expert on anything, really, but I like to read articles on science topics. I’m not sure when I first heard of Pando. It’s a quaking aspen colony in the Fishlake National Forest and it’s the most massive single organism in the world (that we know of at this point, at least). Not the largest in area — that’s a fungus in eastern Oregon — but the, one source I read says, “heaviest,” which is I guess accurate in Earth’s gravity. Mass, though, isn’t just weight. It’s the amount of “stuff” that compose the object.

Pando has one root system and thousands of stems. The scientists suspected that Pando was one big tree and once they could examine its DNA, they saw that every cell of every stem for over a hundred acres had the exact same DNA. And not like all Cavendish banana plants have the same DNA (though they do). From what I can tell, the epigenetics, the changes in the expression of the genes, are the same, as well. And that would basically not happen from cloned plants.

Pando 2016 — Pando in the Fishlake National Forest, near Richfield, Utah, 2016

On the slightly less uplifting front, Pando may be dying. It’s had a good run; scientists estimate that it’s 80,000 years old at a minimum, but people would like to help extend its life. They’ve fenced off portions and are experimenting on them to see what it would take to keep the tree alive. So I guess I’m glad I got to see it when I did.

While we were down there, we decided to check out Fish Lake itself. And Fish Lake was amazing. It was the bluest lake that I think I’ve ever seen. I joked with Alex that they put Ty-D-Bol in the lake. Unfortunately, Alex is too young to remember Ty-D-Bol so the joke was lost on him.

So we drove around the lake for a while, marveling at the blue color (which is, of course, totally natural, the blue color is something to do with limestone in the water) and taking pictures. Then I girded my loins for the trip back to Salt Lake City.

Why did I have to gird my loins? Well, we drove down from Salt Lake City immediately after landing and getting our bags and rental car. This trip is how I discovered that the seat of the car was incompatible with my seat. As a result, drives that Google Maps said would take seven hours tended to take nine or more. I ended up having to stop every hour and a half to two hours to rest my rear end.

National Geographic May 2013, Part 2

Breaking the Silence, by Alexandra Fuller, photographs by Robin Hammond

When I saw the previous article on Wrangel Island, my first thought was that this was going to be an article on global climate change. To my pleasant surprise it wasn’t. Then I turned the page and found an article on the other recurring theme of these issues, unrest in Africa.

The unrest, this time, surrounds the then-34-year-old reign (all things considered, I hesitate to use the term “administration”) of Robert Mugabe, President of Zimbabwe. In, apparently, the interest of full disclosure, Fuller tells us that she lived for a time in what was then Rhodesia and that her parents were active in keeping the white minority in power. She introduces Mugabe with these two sentences: Robert Gabriel Mugabe exuded an air of conciliatory magnanimity. My mother wasn’t buying it.

This sentence bothered me. I spent the rest of the article looking for bias. Granted, Fuller describes her parents’ efforts as “a questionable cause,” but still, I am not sure what purpose the sentence about her mother serves.

The rest of the article is largely a chronology of the reign of Mugabe and a look into the things that the people of Zimbabwe are doing to rebel against Mugabe.

Our Fertilized World, by Dan Charles, photographs by Peter Essick

I spend too much time surrounded by faux science pro-“organic” propaganda. The opening sentence of the blurb: If we don’t watch out, agriculture could destroy our planet, had me prepared for more of that sort of thing. The little voice that asks whom the writer would let starve to get the organic utopia he wants was just getting warmed up when Charles outright admits that our culture depends on the existence of artificial fertilizer.

Our Fertilized World is not so much pro-organic as anti-overfertilization. We see some of the studies being done to find better ways to fertilize it without overfertilizing.

Next up in National Geographic articles (to be posted on or around July 31, I think?), the little voice in my head is really, really bothered by nitrogen being given an atomic number of 123. And 127.