Galápago-go-gos

The Galápagos Islands are a bunch of parched, scrubby lava rocks.  They are series of 18 main volcanic rock piles "vomited up" from the ocean floor, right on the "belly-band" of the equator, 605 miles off the Ecuadorian coast.  The first time I saw a description of them was in my 20s reading the great Vonnegut novel of the same name.  Kurt Vonnegut does not romanticize these vomit-rocks, not one bit.  "Only one English word describes this transformation of the islands from worthless to priceless: magical."

Plenty of romance has been heaped on Charles Darwin though.  Darwin's visage with his now trademark-able big white beard are all over the island town of Puerto Ayora, the biggest settlement on the archipelago with 12,000 inhabitants, most of whom depend directly or indirectly on tourism -- or research.  My favorite is the slick, minimalist logo for the Iguana Factory where Darwin has been equipped with a Che beret, "the evolution revolution."  I don't know what the Iguana Factory fabricates, probably T-shirts, maybe they do iguana sausage, but I doubt it has anything to do with science.  Anyhow, after a smattering of British pirates, Darwin was one of the first tourists to visit the Galápagos.  Here he was supposed to have been inspired by the variety of finches on the island in developing his theory of evolution.  Like the apple bonking Newton on the head, it's a neat myth -- but no more than that.

To start with, it wasn't Darwin's theory at all, but one that had been kicked about for years before Darwin even boarded the HMS Beagle in 1831.  In 1809, a French fellow named Lamarck was the first to put out a working scheme for evolution, which he called "transmutation," a term Darwin and his contemporaries used as well to explain how particular species might be related to each other.  It was fifty later that he rocked the world with Origin of Species... or On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection if you're not into the whole brevity thing.  In "one long argument" (as he often described the book) Darwin lays out the blueprint for how things change, the mechanisms for evolution, for adaptation, variation -- namely selection in its various forms.  True, the main idea struck him shortly after he returned to England, but he'd mulled over his ideas on his "thinking path," batted it around with his contemporaries, and agonized over its potential impact on western society for a long, long time.

But first, he had to go to the Galápagos.  At age 26, four years into his famous voyage on the Beagle, he set foot on the islands.  As an amateur naturalist and hired "gentleman companion" of Captain FitzRoy, he didn't know what he was looking at when he collected what are now known as "Darwin's Finches."  He was too enthralled by the other creatures he saw, like the monstrous-looking marine iguanas and huge land turtles.  According to his own journals, Darwin throws an iguana into the sea over and over, only to have it swim right back to him.  In his book the Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner writes: "Contrary to legend, as [science historian] Sulloway has shown, Darwin did not think the finches were very important.  He did not even think they were all finches."

Famously, some of the islands’ finches have fat beaks, some of the finches have sharp beaks, some of them have thin, needly beaks like warblers -- that part is well-known -- each have a specific tool for a specific niche.   But Darwin thought they were different unrelated species of "warblers" and "gross-beaks."  After shooting a bunch of them on various islands and stuffing them, Darwin had chucked them all into the same bag, without labeling the home island of the individual birds! -- the key information that he needed to unlock the idea of Natural Selection, his first true stroke of genius.  It wasn't until he got back to England that he even realized his finches might be different types, but variations on a theme.  After donating his already famous specimen collections to the London Zoological Society, however, they were examined tout de suite by an ornithologist named John Gould (Darwin even took an apartment in London so he could closely follow the developments).  Gould quickly pronounced the finches 12 separate species of finch -- all relations -- which just totally knocked Darwin's socks off.  And for the next 25 years, the original Chuck D. worked on, obsessed with, amdn mulled over and over his ideas, much to the detriment of his health.  It is said that he was rarely well.

Much of Origin is speculation with little to nothing in the way of direct observable evidence.  Sure, he had fossil records and specimens he picked up in Chile while aboard the Beagle.  He also became quite the hand at breeding fancy English pigeons.  He had as many as fifteen breeds, which he showed off to the geologist Charles Lyell and used specifically as an analogy for Natural Selection in Origin.  But it's really Peter and Rosemary Grant, a couple of British evolutionary biologists by way of Princeton, who have proved that the "one long argument" is more than mere speculation.  The Grants have been studying the finches of Daphne Major since 1971 -- all of them.  Each and every finch birth, finch mating, and finch death; each beak has been measured, and each bird has been weighed and recorded for over four decades.  The Grants, with Darwin lurking in the foreground, are the subject of Weiner's Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Beak of the Finch.  Since we're sometimes short on reading material here in Ecuador, I read it.  And despite myself (and my taste for bad westerns and pulp fiction), I was enthralled.

And so it was a little thrill for me -- and a big thrill for my wife, a biologist and self-proclaimed nerd -- to see Daphne Major when we first landed on the island of Baltra.  If the rest of the 13 big islands of the Galápagos are rocks, Daphne Major is a tiny trapezoidal pebble.  Which is what makes it perfect for studying evolution, literally watching evolution in action.  Because there are so few plant and animal species interacting, the Grants and their team have been able to band and measure, to know every finch on the island, for generations of finches.  The Grants have managed to demonstrate, with numbers, facts, and evidence what Darwin couldn't: among other things, that evolution is an observable, dynamic, on-going process.  And in doing so, the Grants have disproved one of Darwin's main tenets -- and hang-ups -- that is that evolution occurs too slowly to observe.  On the contrary, they've watched it from month to month, year to year.

The finches -- or chiques  as they're called by locals -- have filled every niche in the Galápagos that other birds haven't, including the pesky English Sparrow.  So in Puerto Ayora, you can't go to an open air restaurant without a few little chiques working for food.  I watched one snag a piece of fruit out of a guy's bowl when he went to the bathroom.  At a local beach, you can see them scavenging for crackers.  The finches around Puerto Ayora are not going hungry.

But less than two hours away by bus and boat, the finches on Daphne Major are struggling for existence.  One of the things the Grants and their team have shown is that pressures force and expedite change.  On Daphne Major, in a drought year when the three species of finches who live there have exhausted all of the easy-to-find seeds, they resort to their specialized beaks to crack open the tougher seeds.  All the while, their cousins back on Santa Cruz are scavenging Ritz crackers for easy meals and happily hybridizing.

Our meals were relatively easy to get as well.  When Darwin and the crew of the Beagle showed up on the islands after four years of sailing, they were psyched to find fresh food, in the form of birds and tortoises, which can live up to a year without food or water.  Instead, we wandered down to the fish market in town and bought Wahoo and Mero (? which we're pretty sure is a grouper), while the fishermen cleaning fish shooed away the sea-lions and pelicans with homemade sea-lion swatters, a plastic bag fixed to the end of a stick.  We bought bread, wine, and fresh vegetables at a supermarket, went to our rented home, and cooked delicious meals on a gas stove.

Life now on the island of Santa Cruz bustles, and Academy Bay is full of cruise ships, luxury yachts, and water taxis.  Of all of the places we've been in Ecuador, this place was by far the most chi-chi.  It's easy to spend a lot of money in Puerto Ayora, but it's also got a local, down to earth side.  The farther you walk from the waterfront, the cheaper prices get.  As well, the locals-to-tourists ratio climbs exponentially by the block.  If you leave the supermarket and walk uphill, you can find fruit and vegetable stalls where you can haggle over the price of a pineapple or a chicken.

But because a lot of things are shipped to Santa Cruz, it's two, three, or four times more expensive than on the mainland.  97% of the islands are National Park, and if you are land-based tourists as we were, you need a professional, certified Galápagos guide to take you around.  The entrance fee to the park is 100 bucks for extranjeros, five for Ecuadorians, paid at the airport upon successful completion of your paperwork.  From town you can island hop to different authorized sites, though many places are off-limits even to scientists.  And the finches are everywhere.  It's said that "only God and Peter

Grant can recognize Darwin's finches," so I was wary from the start.  We may have seen more than two species (Cactus and Medium Ground-finch), but I won't speculate.  Still, of the 27 species we saw on the three of the islands, nine of them were endemic -- priceless.

The two tours we took were 90 bucks a piece.  One day I saw the Galápagos Hawk and the Galápagos  Pigeon.  You could look at it as 45 dollars an endemic specie, but there was so much more than that.  Vonnegut's point about value -- thanks to big human brains -- was about perception.  Since Darwin and subsequent evolutionary biologists changed the way we view ourselves and our habitat, the Galápagos has gained value for all of us.  Unfortunately, the cost of human existence goes up from year to year, and not just in dollars, of course.  I wonder whether ecotourism is an oxymoron, but Santa Cruz was the most eco-minded place we've been so far in this equatorial nation -- they have to be.  When Darwin first arrived in the Galápagos the tortoise and finch were potential food sources; now they're bread and butter for the little town of Puerto Ayora.

fire!

OBOZ STORY

Snow Fleas: That Dirty Snow is Alive!

Think of the Earth as a giant cherry tomato with skewer running right through it.  Scientists believe that while our solar system was in the process of forming something really big, another “protoplanet” hit the Earth and slapped it out of kilter.  So, as most kids forget by the end of high school, the Earth spins on a skewer that is 23.5 degrees off its orbital axis.  As the planet takes its yearly trek around the sun, the Northern hemisphere either receives direct light, as in summer or indirect light, as in winter -- which creates seasons that are “near perfectly calibrated to maintain life”, according to Universe Today.  Thanks to that skewer, New Englanders enjoy (or loathe as the case may be) typically long, cold, and snowy winters. 

As winter winds down in New England, ice and snow begin to loosen their grip on the landscape, and signs of spring begin to emerge, sometimes literally right out of the snow.  By March steam pours from vents of sugar-houses as sugar-makers begin boiling maple sap down into Vermont’s signature liquid.  On those same late winter days when the temps begin to push into the 50s and the streams begin to run full of snow-melt, a hiker or skier might come upon a patch of snow that looks at first like it was dusted with cinders or black sand.  That black on white contrast arrests the eyes. 

What at first looks like fine dirt turns out to be a little millimeter-long hexapod, the springtail, or as they're colloquially known, "snow fleas". Various springtails exist all over the planet, but they somehow manage to persist even in extreme winter climates like Antarctica and northern New England. These intrepid little snow enthusiasts turn up by the thousands per square meter, up to 10,000 of them in fact, according to legendary naturalist David Attenborough. Even at high elevations, in late winter springtails emerge from the snow in huge numbers on warm afternoons in order to feed on decomposing leaves or moss. Snow fleas represent not only the inevitable arrival of spring in the northern woods, but some of nature's amazing adaptations that allow for a specie's survival -- and perhaps has some benefits for humankind as well.

First though, they’re not technically insects.  Besides the number of body segments and the lack of compound eyes, an extra little appendage sets them apart from their taxonomic cousins: the spring tail which gives them their name.  Called a “furcula” (same word root as “fork”), this adaptation seems particularly designed to allow the springtail to evade predators.  The snow fleas’ exoskeleton is full of a “rubber-like protein called resilin, where a lot of the potential energy for the jump is stored,” according to an article in Wired magazine.  Basically, springtails are always running around cocked and loaded.  When threatened by a predator, like a spider or centipede, they deploy their ejection seat and launch 100s times their body-length -- the equivalent of a person jumping over the Eiffel Tower (Attenborough).  Unfortunately for these spring-loaded little launchers, they cannot control where they land, so their jump is a sort of randomizer.  Then again, when there’s a party of 1000s of snow fleas, it probably doesn’t matter where you end up -- they just hop to the other side of the fiesta.

Still, the springtail has to survive the winter to make it to these spring bacchanals, and to weather the long New England winter, even at high elevations where winter runs even colder and longer, the snow flea uses a built-in anti-freeze to make it through.  Tiny peptide chains known as anti-freeze proteins (AFPs), they allow a variety of organisms, among them fish, fungi, and plants, to survive extremely cold climates. AFPs operate at the molecular level “by binding to the surfaces of ice crystals as they start to form, inhibiting further growth,” according to an article by Steve Ritter in Chemical & Engineering News.  By preventing the formation of ice crystals, AFPs prevent organisms from freezing solid, thus ensuring survival.

Snow fleas have another chemical defense, this one specifically designed to deter predators: a chlorine compound called Sigillan A.  Researchers in Germany have isolated something that “is unique in that it is a new class of natural products that features a chemical scaffold that could find application in insect control,” as reported in an article by Sarah Evarts in Chemical & Engineering News.  Scientists were surprised to find any chlorine compounds at all produced by a land animal.  “It’s not often that scientists find any halogens in natural products made by terrestrial organisms … here, there’s not just one chlorine, but five chlorines,” according to John Pickett, chemical ecologist from Rothamsted Research Station in England.

Snow fleas’ chemical adaptations, AFPs in particular, may come to help humans in a couple of ways, perhaps most importantly with organs for transplant.  According to a piece in Phys.org, Drs. Laurie Graham and Peter Davis [of Queens University] “found that the potent protein produced by the fleas to protect themselves against freezing is capable of inhibiting ice growth by about six Celsius degrees.”  This is significant because it would allow “organs to be stored at lower temperatures, expanding the time allowed between removal and transplant.”  Moreover, snow fleas’ AFPs break down easily at higher temperatures.  This is beneficial, explained Dr. Davies, Canada Research Chair in Protein Engineering, because AFPs used for organ transplant storage “will be cleared from a person’s system very quickly, reducing the possibility of harmful antibodies forming.”  Thus, the potential for successful transplants increases dramatically.

Other studies show that springtail chemistry may also help bring about more effective freeze-resistant crops.  But aside from their promising contributions to humanity, snow fleas are decomposers, and as such they perform an arguably more important role for humans: helping to maintain the balance and health of our northern forests by facilitating the breakdown of organic material.  Decomposers maintain a healthy soil substrata on which trees and forests can thrive.  And with those forests spread all over this skewed and changing planet, the humans who occupy it, for now, are still able to breathe.  

Cotopaxi Beat Down

Field Trip: Cotopaxi, June 2013

First draft, April 2015

Latest draft, April 2016

“No, no,” Pete said to Segundo in Spanish. “I’ve known this man for eighteen years.  He’s one tough bastard.  It’s not fitness; it’s the altitude.” 

I was on my knees, leaning on my ice-ax.  Sleet, wind, and freezing rain pounded down on us. I could make out the shadows of the two men in my headlamp.  It must have been about 4 AM, with the light just coming up on the glacier, but I hadn’t had the energy to pull back the cuff of my glove to check my watch for the entire three-plus hours we’d been slowly marching uphill.

“Solo faltamos trescientos metros,” Segundo said to Pete.

One tough bastard himself, our guide Segundo said we were only 300 meters from the summit.  Another hour, he said.  On the list of the many bad-asses I’ve met in my life, Segundo is at the top of the list.  He spoke in meters while I was on my knees, trying to convert meters to feet in my head.  I’m not so quick with numbers, even in the best of circumstances.  What I now know is that we were resting there, near the top of a glacier, on the side of Ecuador’s second highest peak and the world’s tallest active volcano, Cotopaxi, at about 18,300 feet.  Since I don’t have any real mountaineering ambitions, it is likely the highest I will ever go on foot. 

I also now know that I was experiencing altitude sickness, or Acute Mountain Sickness (AMS), and possibly even hypoxia.  Whatever it’s called, my body was not cooperating with my brain due to a lack of oxygen.  While from the outside the symptoms look like intoxication — and actually felt like it — my brain was hyper-aware.  Though I was babbling incoherently, I remember perfectly the details from the trek, the dialogue between Segundo and Pete in that moment — and, ultimately, the decision to turn back.  Pete and I laughed later about the “eighteen years” line because it was so random and specific at the same time — and short a couple years. 

My most vivid memory on the glacier was setting tiny goals: ten steps, just ten steps, then rest.  Then I’d count out five or six crunchy footfalls in the narrow beam of my headlamp before I’d drop to my knees and rest on my ice-axe again.  I have tested myself in many kinds of endurance events, and this one blew them all away.  I’d sooner run another marathon, barefoot and blindfolded, than take another ten steps at 18,000 feet.

I might have even enjoyed the sensation, had it not been for Thor’s Hammer knocking incessantly on the inside of my skull, a sensation I now think was probably my pulse.  This was my biggest crime (and I should have known better): dehydration.  I just could not get enough water into my system.  I should have had Advil and coca leaves — the latter of which is renowned among indigenous people of the Andes and climbers alike for its ability to counteract the symptoms of AMS.  By the time we reached the high camp where I’d attempt to sleep, my head was pounding a thousand times worse than the worst hangover I’d ever experienced.

So Pete and Segundo made the call to retreat, and I am forever thankful for that decision.  I remember well the feeling of disappointment being eclipsed by a massive sense of relief.  The weather was nasty, as it can often be at 18,000 feet.  Later, when we stepped off the glacier, we were coated in a layer of ice so that, when I bent my arm, all these little pieces of ice would shatter off.  There was little to no chance we’d have a clear view from Cotopaxi’s famous cone summit, which I’m sure made the decision to turn back a little easier.  

Cotopaxi is the iconic symbol of the glaciated Andean volcano: it rises to 19,347 feet above sea level, a mind-bogglingly massive and, at a distance, perfectly symmetrical cone.  And distances can be deceiving.  Often referred to by indigenous locals as the “Shy Lady” because it’s so often shrouded in clouds, Cotopaxi literally means “shining pile” in Kichwa, which is still widely spoken in the Andes.  Its sprawling flanks and surrounding páramo form the Cotopaxi National Refuge, and that covers more than 33 thousand hectares — or upwards of 90,000 acres!  At base camp, we were able to glimpse the summit through clouds a couple of times, and I remember thinking, all I have to do is walk there.  I know from running track that, in my day, I could have covered 300 meters, or just under1K, in 40 seconds or so.  Yet standing at 18,300 feet of elevation, just 1K below the summit, I might as well have been looking up at the moon. 

The difference, of course is elevation.  And high elevation climbing is all about acclimatization.  Ideally, you spend at least a couple of weeks taking as many high elevation forays as possible.  Just two weeks earlier, however, I’d been training by surfing and running on the beach in Canoa, a little fishing village on the Manabí coast.  After nine months living and cycling and hiking from 8,400 feet and higher, we’d moved to the coast, to sea-level — and thus, I’d forfeited all of the elevation conditioning I had gained in the previous months.  In terms of elevation acclimatization, it only takes a week to lose what it takes months to gain.  This would prove to be a big part of my elevation problem, or at least that’s my theory.  It’s said that some people, regardless of fitness, just can’t do high elevations.  It’s possible that I’m in that boat as well.  By the time we got back to Andes from the coast, I’d only have two weeks to re-acclimate and do a few high elevation hikes – none of which was in excess of 15,000 feet, which is lower than base-camp from which we departed for the summit.  So I may have been doomed from the start.

Cotopaxi is usually attempted from the north side, but my friend Pete had connections with the owner of the less popular Refugio Cara Sur (south face refuge, or retreat).  Don Eduardo, whose land abuts the National Park had, picked us up in Quito in the early morning.  Driving his LP gas modified Toyota Land Cruiser, he stopped once for groceries, and then drove us up the rutted out road to the Refugio, which sits at just under 13,000 feet.  There we ate a lunch of chicken soup, bread and tea, and then got outfitted with our climbing gear: hard plastic boots, crampons, gaiters, heavy shells, helmets, harnesses, and the indispensable ice-axes.  Shortly thereafter, we met Segundo and promptly set off hiking into the páramo, which soon gave way to the iron-streaked lava-scree moonscape of the volcano where high camp was situated, just below the edge of the ice.  So we wound up and up from Quito to high camp, all in the same afternoon. 

Before we left the high camp at a little after midnight, Segundo had asked if we had any extra batteries.  Neither Pete nor I had any extras… just one small headlamp apiece.  Oh well, he’d said, like it was nothing.  Segundo had upwards of 35 summits under his belt on the south face; he knew it like his own backyard.  Well, it was his own back yard.  He’d grown up in Latacunga below, on the shoulder of Cotopaxi.  While preparing soup at base-camp he spoke Kichwa to another guide who was leading a solo climber from Germany.  I assume they were discussing logistics.  Whatever the discussion, he’d led us, he and Pete and I, roped together, winding through crevasses, dropping hundreds of feet in some cases, literally in the dark. 

The logic behind the midnight start-time for the summit hike is the stability of the ice.  When the day warms, the ice becomes more dangerous.  The typical game plan then is to summit around day-break, take a couple pictures, slap some high-fives all around, and descend before the daylight temperatures warm up the ice pack.

We turned back just as dawn was creeping into the valley below.  As we descended, I noticed the mine-field of crevasses we’d navigated.  “Holy shit,” I said aloud to myself several times.  There was one thin spot, especially, where Segundo had us anchor him with ropes and ice-axes as he crossed a narrow ice bridge.  They put me in the middle, incidentally, because I was the heaviest by far, and if I went down a crevasse — the thinking goes — there’s an anchor on either side of me.  If I were first or last and went into the abyss, conversely, there was the fear that I’d drag my two fellow mountaineers down with me. 

Ironically, a big part of the timing for our hike was the fact that June is one of, if not the best times of the year to attempt the summit.  The weather is the most peaceful, and the ice is the most stable.  While we were down on the beach, however, just a few weeks before our anticipated climb, I read in a national newspaper that a Canadian woman was killed by a massive falling chunk of ice while attempting the summit on the north face.  She was in her early 20s and fit, proving that the mountain doesn’t care who you are – a sobering reminder of the consequences of high altitude adventures.

By the time I was back in Otavalo, in the Andes, we had lived in Ecuador for ten months, and despite having to start all over elevation-wise, I was feeling pretty comfortable getting around.  Fuya Fuya Volcano was my local “hill”, my main go-to hike, and it was becoming familiar with several training hikes.  After looking at it for so long and living just under it — and even circumnavigating it — I’d finally hiked Imbabura Volcano with Pete at just over 15,000 feet.  Still, I wonder how I would have done without living for a month at sea-level.

Pete shook me awake, and the hammers started in my head again. 

“We have to get down.  Now.  The longer you stay up here, the worse it gets.”  He was right.  I’d lost two nights of sleep, one due to trip anxiety and 0-dark-thirty travel, and one at the high camp where we were to “nap” from dusk to midnight.  The combination of cold (I had a short, badly insulated sleeping bag) and hurricane-force wind whipping the tarps of the camp, as well as chronic dehydration, I didn’t sleep for a nano-second.  I’d just drifted off for the first time in 48 hours, and the delicious sensation was seductive. 

I crankily roused myself, stuffed my feet into cold-hard mountaineering boots, slid on my outer layers, gathered my gear, and followed Pete down the volcanic moonscape trail back towards the paramo and the Refugio.  With each step we descended, I felt the pressure on my temples let up, and when we got back to Eduardo’s place, I happily gobbled Ibuprofin like skittles and drank a couple pints of water.  On the walk down, I began to re-occupy my own head.  Squat purple and yellow wildflowers dotted the trail, and couple of rainbows even bloomed over the quebradas below us.  What an unearthly and utterly beautiful place.

By the time Don Eduardo was driving us back down toward Quito, I was back to normal and grateful, first for being alive and second for the chance to walk on a glacier. 

Cotopaxi and its sister volcanoes Illiniza and Antisana supply Quito’s 1.6 million people with potable water.  But the glaciers are melting.  Quickly.  Pete’s lived in Ecuador for ten years, and he’s seen the white line receding up the mountain.  Some scientists give the dozen or so glaciated Andean volcanoes another ten years before the ice runs out completely.  t’s a sad state, and one that Americans are responsible for at least as much as Ecuadorians, whose carbon footprints are generally a lot smaller.  Yet it’s Ecuador and the people of the capital who will have to struggle with some sort of replacement long-term — and neither gringos nor South Americans, at least in my personal experience, are good at planning for the long term.  Maybe if Ecuador figures it out, they can give California some pointers.

Back in Vermont, water is still plentiful, and I still take hikes.  But few if any of my mountain adventures around here require climbing harnesses and ice-axes.  Camel’s Hump, my neighborhood go-to hike, always reminds me of a miniature Cotopaxi.  Its summit takes me just over 4,000 feet which is a perfectly fine elevation for me.  Resting Lion, as the indigenous people named it, is also conical in shape, though formed by colliding continental plates rather than uplift.  It’s also much older, having been worn down by the last glaciers that roamed freely over North America, and finally retreated into the arctic.  Unless socked in with clouds, I see it loom over the valley on my evening commute home from work.  And while I only hike it a few times a year, I often think, all I have to do is walk there.      

Original Cotopaxi post with pictures:

http://fargobrook.blogspot.com/2013/06/field-trip-cotopaxi.html

The Shell

“Yes! I see something,” she said.  “I’m just going to dig right in.  Hang on.”

And she did.  She dug right in with needle and tweezers.  I gripped the sides of the table, tried to remain still on the crinkly roll of butcher-block paper they scroll out for each new patient.

After a few long seconds, she said, “Got it!” then dropped the thing into a stainless steel bowl with a tinny clink.  And with that sound I felt two months of tension release from a wound just right of the ball of my right foot.  The thing, a little spine of calcium carbonate – half the length of my pinky nail, had hitched a ride from a South American beach all the way up the east coast to the Green Mountains of Vermont.  Dr. Hannah came around the table and handed me the bowl.  I looked at the little white sliver, and tried to hate it.  But I couldn’t.  Finally, she said, “Well, that’s the last bit of Ecuador in you.” 

Mollusks craft their own shells by manufacturing their own nifty two-step epoxy out of proteins and minerals.  Unlike the shells of tortoises, seashells – like the ones built by clams and oysters for example –

 are not comprised of living cells complete with blood and vessels and nerves; rather, mollusks sculpt their armored homes out of proteins secreted from the “mantle” – which comes from the Latin word for cloak, a folded covering around the spineless little creature.  This “protein matrix” forms the molecular undergirding, and it dictates the structure and shape of the shell.  Then the crafty bivalve secretes minerals, usually calcium carbonate, to fill in the hard material, and this accounts for 95% plus of shell material.  For Genus Spondylus, sometimes called the spiny oyster, this means forming sharp katana-like needles protruding from the center point, an excellent defense.  One that I stepped right into.

The doctor’s words hung there, the irony unfolding in my head like a map.  We – my wife and two children – had been back from a year-long endeavor on the equator for just a few weeks.  The surprising hangover of culture shock would not wear off for months, but this little operation was the official start of the process for me.  In Ecuador, we had lived in the Andes for nine months of our sojourn.  After pulling our children from their school programs, we had decided to travel beyond the weekend forays we’d been making.  We had spent those nine months making a home and meeting people – establishing roots.  I taught a semester of English in a little university and my wife practiced massage therapy, mostly on evangelical gringos.  Yet the longer we stayed, the more obligated we felt to see everything that we possibly could before returning to the states.  In short, our purpose shifted from inward to outward.

After a few weeks of travel, we returned to our little apartment in the Andes.  Once we returned, however, we realized that without our children in school, there was no reason for us to be in the same place for the two remaining months of our stay.  Our sense of purpose had already hopped a bus to Quito.  Plus our house in Vermont was rented for two more months, key to our economic survival for the year.  So, as we made many of our decisions in Ecuador, we moved on a whim (and a little research) to a small fishing/surfing town on the Pacific coast for a month – to learn how to surf, to experience a new place.  The third day we were there, wading out for a morning swim, I stepped squarely on Spondylus. 

For those last two months in Ecuador, I rolled my foot from outside in to avoid the shooting pain of that little shell.  Every once in awhile, I’d try to dig it out myself, unsuccessfully.  Still, I’d run, surf, bike, and hike daily.  I had to train for a summit attempt on Cotopaxi, an iconic glaciated volcano south of Quito, rising up over 18,000’.  My friend Pete and I had scheduled the climb for August, just two weeks before we’d return to the states.  So I had to move.  And to move, I had to roll my foot.   I’d run the beach, five miles a day – in running shoes.  Ultimately, Pete and I were turned back 900’ from the summit by an ice storm and altitude sickness, but my shell also made it to 17,000’. 

Back home at sea-level, I immediately set to work: gardening, cutting brush, putting up wood for winter – and painting houses, something I’ve done for twenty-five years now.  Between school years, I paint – which helps to support a bicycle habit I’ve developed.  I’d hiked and run and cycled with that shell in my foot, but finally having to stand on an aluminum ladder, on the balls of my feet concentrated the pain in new ways.  I knew I finally had to go see a doctor.  I kept to the idea that it would work itself out, but it didn’t.  It wasn’t going to come out by itself on a wave of puss and blood – it needed a midwife: Dr. Hannah.

Of course, Ecuador is in me still, long after the physical effects of a spiny oyster shell wound and a greater capacity for absorbing oxygen at altitude – any place a person spends a year is going to be in him, especially a foreign place.  The word foreign is derived from the Latin word fores or door, after all – it’s anything outside your door.  Experience is getting out the door, wherever it is, and growth.  Like the formation of seashells, which must continually expand outward to accommodate the growth of mollusks, experience helps us expand out from our centers.  And the more we get away from ourselves, the more we understand when we return. 

Skin Game

“It’s the best kind of cancer you can get,” she says hanging up the phone.  I don’t like “best” and “cancer” in the same sentence.  She knew it wasn’t going to be good news when the clinic left a message to call back.  We were camping in a state park in southern Vermont.  All of the little pressing needs of sleeping in tents and living off a picnic table swept us back into the present.

More people have skin cancer than all other types of cancer combined.  Rates of melanoma -- the worst kind of skin cancer -- have gone up 200 percent between 1973 and 2011, according to acting US Surgeon General Boris Luchniak in a recent report.  This type of cancer kills 9,000 people a year.  Despite the alarming rise, skin cancer is both treatable and preventable.


Later, my wife made the appointment to have the growth removed.  Melanin-challenged, I like to call her.  Sun-deprived Northern Europe runs deep in her genes.  She sees a dermatologist regularly who’s mapped and measured the little constellation of moles on her back.  She’s supposed to use wide-brim hats and sunscreen.  Sometimes she forgets the hat.  I nag her about hats all the time.


When I was a kid in the late 70s, we spent all day getting baked by the sun at a pool.  You burned once in the spring, then spent the rest of the summer in a speedo, brown as a bean.  My mother read crime novels while sunbathing on the patio.  Now we make our kids wear swim shirts, and we slather them with a layer of 50 sunscreen.  


Just under 5 million people were treated for skin cancer last year, so most cases of skin cancer are treatable.  But it turns out that a whole lot of them are preventable as well.  Aside from blocking the sun from hitting your skin with shirts, hats, and screens, you can stay out of tanning beds.  


The use of tanning beds is the American cheese of the beauty industry.  Both are ultimately fakes; while they might look tasty at first, they leave you unnourished; and they both give off an unnatural orangey glow.  Thanks in part to the popularity of tanning beds with particular demographics, “over the last three decades, the number of people with skin cancer has grown higher than that of all other cancers combined.”


Among other findings, The Surgeon General’s report concluded that tanning with electricity contributes to two thirds of the new melanoma cases each year, over 6,000 cases.  Additionally, skin cancer is the most widespread type of cancer among youth and young adults.  And so they’ve taken some corrective action by banning the use of tanning beds for people under 18.  


The Indoor Tanning Association -- yes, there really is such an organization -- disputes the link between melanoma and fabricated ultraviolet light.  If tanning on a tanning bed is American Cheese, the ITA must be Kraft.  


Like hats, you can wear them or not.  Hey, it’s a free country, right?  I can go on down to the store and buy myself a pack of Marlboro Reds if I want.  Maybe a better analogy for indoor tanning and the ITA is Philip Morris.


“Proponents of sun avoidance always exaggerate the risks of exposure to ultraviolet light in order to get the attention of the public, the media and the government,” the association said.  But let’s just take a look at the motives here for a second: tanning beds are about turning profit by appealing to vanity, and the SG is about promoting health by appealing to common sense.  


As for me I’ll keep trying to promote common sense in my family: I’ll keep packing the hats.

MTB in the VT

At the top of the hill, I slide my fingers into a fresh, dry pair of gloves, flex then ball them into a fist to get the fit right.  I cinch on my helmet, slide my glasses into place, and swing my backpack onto my shoulders.  My bike leans against a small hemlock.  It’s a full-suspension rig, which means that both the front and the rear-end have shocks (with over 5” of “travel”) to absorb and smooth out the roots and rocks of the trail.  It has hydraulic disc brakes to control speed with a finger or two, and the seat-post is also on a hydraulic lift so that I can drop it low on technical descents, get way out over the rear wheel for stability and flow.  I lift the rear-end to check for wobble, but it feels solid -- so I mount up and push off into the first feature series of the descent: a rocky spine of schist which drops off into to a series of switchbacks cut into the hill with hand-dug berms.  I let go the brakes and let the bike run into the corners.  It hums right over roots and small boulders.  I’m a kid again.  A boy in the woods on a bike with a grin on his face looking down the line of the next dirt jump.

And that for me is what it’s all about.  The aerobic exercise is good, and the adrenaline is fun -- but getting back to the kid in the 43 year-old me is more than just exercise.  It’s a near daily purification ritual that involves getting dirty.  The thing is, I have a few more resources than when I was twelve, and my toys are a little more sophisticated.  While the main idea is still rolling on two wheels, Mountain biking has come a long way since the late 80s when off-road specific bicycles first became popular -- a long way.  Even if riders resist it, the sport has grown up.

First developed in the late 70s, mostly in Marin County, CA, the sport of mountain biking began with the old newsie “klunker” and Mount Tam.  The pioneers of the sport -- some of whom are the empresarios of today’s industry -- began with bikes of the 50s because they were solid, steel, heavy, and most importantly: durable.  These guys, and some women too, would take these klunker-beasts to the top of Mount Tamalpais and then “race” down.  Allegedly, first prize was often “smokable”.  As they began to break theses bikes, they began to innovate.  As the frames were too heavy for climbs, they began to build more durable off-road frames.   Easy as that, a new sport was born.

But it would take another couple of decades for the bikes to get really burly -- a lot of them even look more like off-road motorcycles than they do their now distant “roadie” cousins.  And they certainly owe some of the technological advances to the motor-sport as well, namely hydraulic suspension, hydraulic disc brakes, and big, fat knobby tires.  Time after time, I am amazed at what the technology has allowed me to do.  Sure, I can ride the same trails on an old “rigid” bike with no suspension -- sometimes I do -- but with the new version, I can tear down the trail at twice the speed, huck my 210 pound self off of ledges four or five feet above the landing, land with a gentle ka-thunk, and flow on.  

Not only has the bike evolved, but the surface on which we ride has been significantly and mind-alteringly improved, just in the last six or eight years.  In the “old days”, we either found old logging roads, fire-roads to ride.  We made “rake and ride” trails -- that is, we raked off what we wanted to ride, and then we rode it -- over and over until it was officially a trail.  

Now trails are designed, and they use some sophisticated tools to get the job done.  Trail builders even plan and use math!  They scrape off the first layers of earth, down to the clay if possible; they rake it out, fill it with rock that drains, and pack it back in.  They build huge earthen walls called berms that are specifically calibrated to let a bike tear around a corner, 180 degrees, downhill -- without braking!  And uphill climbs are now so full of switchbacks and contour-following lines that it hardly even feels like you’re climbing a hill.  These designers have learned to work with Vermont hills so that it’s all about “flow”.  They design and build trails that wind through the woods and mesh with the environment so well that you forget the massive amount of work that went into them.  

But a lot does go into them.  A typical mountain bike trail in VT costs about five bucks a foot, on average.  This cost comes from machinery, often full-time staffers for various areas, and materials.  VT is wet, and it takes some decking and engineering to build over some of low areas.  We used to cut trail at night, without permission, but organizations like VMBA (VT Mountain Bike Association) coordinate projects with private land-owners and public lands.  This organization takes infrastructure.  Maturity.

Vermont has become a Mecca for mountain biking in the Northeast with hundreds of miles of these bike-specific single-track trails.  When I go to several of my local spots -- and I’m lucky to have a dozen great trail networks within a 30 minute drive -- there are always cars from Massachusetts, New York, and especially Quebec.  These have become “destination” riding centers.  

It’s easy to take things for granted when you have it good.  I don’t though, even after twenty years in Vermont.  I did my time in the flat, tree-deprived, soybeans-and-corn midwest as a teenage pent-up ski bum and road biker.  I know Vermont is weird; we like it that way.  We do things here like ban roadside billboards and offer free, universal health-care up to age 24.  We know our neighbors, and we know we can depend on them in a pinch.  Sometimes we even work on the neighborhood trails together.  Mainstream doesn’t count for much in the 802, and that goes for “fringe” sports as much as anything else.  The fact that I can hop on my bike, spin out my driveway for a good ride on mountain bike trails keeps me grinning like a kid.