Year 3: Part 1: Post 7: Tracking in Winter

It's good to be able to go tracking with Rick again. While I was off campus this winter I kept up my habit of going tracking every few days, just as I kept up my physical exercises and the mental and spiritual exercises Joy has me doing (that sounds lovely, doesn't it? I exercise for Joy!). It seems like a lot, but I didn't have anything else to do except my various practices and assignments. No classes, no job...I could nap whenever I wasn't doing assignments, if I wanted to, and sometimes I did.

But it's good to have someone else to track with again.

We don't always go together in the literal sense. Sometimes we go out at around the same time but to different places and then compare notes. Sometimes I take him to see tracks I'm confused about and sometimes I tag along and he shows me what he can see, which is still always more than what I see. I'm not actually sure whether Rick wants my company on these outings. I don't think he ever minds being alone, and yet he seems to like being my guide into the world of tracking.

That world is so much bigger than I thought it was when I first started.

Last year was mostly about identification--figuring out which species did what was easy the first time I went out, but it got harder later as snow conditions changed. I was learning to notice detail and I was mostly using that detail to identify who made the track and which gait they were using. I liked following the story of one particular animal as it moved across the landscape.

This year I guess I'm getting a wider, deeper view. I want to know when a certain track was laid down and why the animal was using the gait it was. In a field full of tracks, what order were they made? I'm getting very interested in snow conditions--how do snow conditions change the look of the track when it is first laid down, and how do changing conditions alter the track as it ages? I've started copying over Lilac's notes (she's a mastery candidate interested in weather) so I can see when it was last windy or above freezing, or anything else that can alter but not obscure the snow surface. That way I can tell when a track was laid down more precisely and I can see the story on the show laid out clearly in time as well as space.

I'm also getting more into using my other senses besides vision.

Basically, I've started sniffing everything. I learned last year that foxes and porcupines have distinctive scents to their urine. I've just now learned that so do deer. Or, at least some deer do--the scent is slightly pine-like (it's not unpleasant at all), so maybe only deer that eat pine needles pee piny urine.

I come back from these trips all excited. I run around telling everybody what I saw and where and how I saw it, so there are a few people getting interested and wanting to learn tracking, too. I tried suggesting that Charlie do a second tracking seminar (he already does one) but he actually told me I should teach it myself, that I probably know more about tracking, at this point, than he does--which was pretty incredible to hear and I'm not sure if I believe it. Interestingly, he didn't make my doing such a thing an assignment. He hasn't given me any new assignments, just keeps saying I should keep up the good work. He just said that if I think there should be another tracking mini-class, I should make it happen myself.

There's no rule about who in the community can teach these things. Novices don't usually teach, but there are exceptions, and Charlie has had me teach some things before. The only thing is that nobody is obligated to attend your class, if they don't think you're any good. So there's a bit of a threat to the ego involved with volunteering.

Still, I didn't have to think about it before too long before I decided I wanted to do it. Rick agreed to help me, and we both talked to Sharon about getting on the schedule. At her suggestion, we actually made it a workshop, four meetings. The first meeting will be scheduled next time tracking conditions are good and we'll go out and show people tracks. The next two meetings we'll do mostly indoors, with visual aids and models, and then the last one will be in good snow conditions again.

So, that is exciting.

Year 2: Part 6: Post 4: Homework

Remember, at the beginning of the semester, when I was all happy that Charlie's class only had one homework assignment? I was psyched. I thought I'd be able to focus on my other classes and basically not do much in that one class because there was only one assignment, due at the end.

Famous last words. I was wrong, of course, REALLY wrong. That one assignment is almost a dissertation. It's due tomorrow.

The class is Creating Campus, and it covers the ecological and horticultural theory behind the landscaping of the school. Each week, we've covered a different principle, like co-evolution, energy transfer, or spatial structure, using campus as an example. It's been fun and interesting. Charlie's assigned a lot of reading--he tends to assume that everyone can read as fast as he does, which is not remotely true--but he said at the beginning that the reading is for us not for him and he's not going check to see if we do it. There's only this one assignment he's really going to check.

We have to design a new feature for the campus landscape plan and fully document how and why it would work.

We're not actually going to build our features, it's just an educational exercise, but he says he's used elements of student plans before and might again. He's also had students go into ecological landscaping after they graduate and adapt their final projects for use with clients. So this is kind of a big deal.

I didn't just start the assignment today, I'm not that bad--I got working on it seriously about a week and a half ago--but I still left myself with too little time. I think I'm going to make it, and I'm doing a good job, but only because I've been staying up late night after night and working insanely hard on it.

Our design has to include at least two of the ecological principles we covered in class, plus is must be attractive, must not interfere with human use of the campus, and must solve some shortcoming of the existing plan. I didn't perceive any shortcoming of the existing plan, so that last part was hard for me. I ended up using as my starting point something Charlie said back in the spring, when we were on the Island together. He was sitting, looking at the water and listening to the waves, as he often did, when he sighed and spoke.

"That's the one thing campus is missing--water."

Allen was with us, and he pointed out that there is, in fact, a pond on campus, not to mention the lake nearby, but Charlie shook his head.

"No, running water, moving water," he said. "Something you can sit and listen to."

So I started thinking how I could design something to fix that. After all, you can build an artificial stream using a pump to take the water from a pool at the the bottom back up to a pool at the top. But even if the pump were solar powered, like the fountains are, I don't think Charlie would like that very much. One of the things he said in class was to pay attention to what the land was already doing. There is a time for making dramatic changes, by mimicking an earlier fire regime, for example, or removing an invasive species and starting over, but if you don't understand the system very well already, always default to going with the flow. "Let the land stay in character," he would say, or "help your site do what it what it was already doing. Don't make it do what it doesn't want to."

And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that our patch of land doesn't want to have a stream on it. But it might want another wetland.

So, in the end I dispensed with the stream idea, and my plan evolved into using the waste water from the Mansion to make a wetland on the Flat Field. I figured that would meet the human usefulness requirement, because that water now goes through a filter and then into a fairly traditional septic field, and I know they are working to come up with some more useful alternative. I figure, why not pipe that water into an artificial wetland and use it to fertilize some flowers? That field also receives runnoff from almost a quarter of campus, including most of our impermeable surfaces, so it's also a good place for a rain garden.

The Flat Field, as you may recall, is the graded footprint of a huge barn that burned down before the School took over this property. It's at least a hundred feet on a side, flat as the name implies, and boarded on two sides by a steep embankment going down and on two sides by an embankment going up. My plan involves scooping out a shallow depression at the corner where the higher ground slopes down to the Field and then grading it out so that the whole Field slopes in to the corner. Then pipe the waste water to a point just inside that slope, above the depression, so the soil could act as a secondary filter and there wouldn't be a pool of dirty water. When it rained, a pool would form for a while, but otherwise the soil would just be wet. I'd plant it with wetland flowers that like a lot of nutrients--yes, I listed them--put stepping stones through the middle of it, and a couple of benches around the outer edge of it. I even charted out the blooming times of the different flowers so it would provide nectar and look good continuously throughout the growing season.

It's taken me a little over a week to calculate the proper size for the garden to handle the water it would receive and to work out the species list. Now, I have to rewrite the whole thing, rework all my visual aids, my maps and plans and charts, and format it. Charlie gave us this detailed list of exactly how the thing has to be formatted, even right down to where the page numbers have to be and what size font we have to use--unusually, it does have to be typed. I don't expect to sleep tonight, especially considering that I have other classes where I also have homework due.

The thing is, I think I've gone completely crazy over the past few days. I'm not thinking about anything other than homework, I'm not doing anything other than homework, I'm like this complete homework zombie. I'm serious, it's mind-altering.

It's kind of the opposite of what most of Charlie's teachings do--open me up, make me more aware of the world. This assignment is making me less aware. It's my own fault, for putting this off until the last minute. I have nothing profound to say.

[Next Post: Monday, October 28th: Interlude]

Year 2: Part 1: Post 10: Preparing for Spring

So, I have a plan about how to win the egg hunt.

The issue is that I still don't know enough about birds, and there are lots of people on campus who are more likely to be able to spot bird's nests than I am. I need some kind of leg up.

Fortunately, I have a two-week head-start for looking for nests. The yearlings won't know about the hunt until it happens (or, at least, we didn't know about it ahead of time, last year) and most of the senior students won't bother preparing for the contest because it doesn't matter that much to them. So the only people I really have to worry about are the handful of other people who are really likely to spot nests on their own before the contest starts, like Rick and Raven G.

To beat them, I need to be able to produce great pictures. That's the other half of the contest; you have to find the birds' nests and take pictures of them and you get points for both finding the nests and the quality of the photos. Well, I don't know much about photography, but we do the contest in teams. So I have to find a team-mate ahead of time, too. Someone who takes great pictures.

I don't know who takes great pictures and who doesn't, and I didn't want to go around asking everybody if they take pictures because then my advantage would be gone. Everyone would know

what I was doing and why. So, I asked Sharon. She knows everything.

"I do?" she said when I said that her. "I don't know about that."

"Yes, you do. You know everything around here, at least. You're our resident spider." You've got to understand that here at school "spider" is a compliment. A lot of people claim spiders as personal mascots, spirit-helpers, or totems. You don't kill spiders here unless you actually want to become unpopular, and I know people who encourage spiders to live in their rooms as pets or familiars. What I meant was that Sharon is aware of the school the same way a spider is aware of whatever happens on its web.

"I am not!" She was blushing.

"Ok, who's the best photographer on campus?"

"Jasmine. She's a yearling in Elk dorm."

"See?"

"Good luck with the egg-hunt, Daniel."

I hadn't told her I was trying to win the egg hunt. She just knew.

So, I found Jasmine and introduced myself and asked her to be my team-mate for the egg-hunt.

"Isn't that cheating?" she asked.

"No. They can't stop us from noticing birds ahead of time, so how could looking for them ahead of time be cheating?"

"But we can't take pictures ahead of time."

"No. But once I find the nests, you can figure out how you'll want to take the best pictures, angles and lighting and so forth. Then we'll have less to do on the actual day."

"I don't want to just take pictures for you, Daniel. I want to find nests, too."

"Of course," I told her. "And I want to learn more about photography." And so we made a deal. She'll teach me some about photography and I'll show her how to find nests. Of course, I don't actually know anything about looking for birds' nests, but I know how to sit around quietly and watch and listen outdoors and I expect that's at least half of it.

It seems strange to be talking about nesting birds while there's still six inches of snow.

Speaking of which, we just had Charlie's tracking workshop. Charlie had asked me to get good enough at tracking so I could lead the workshop if he got sick, but I didn't have to. He's had his spring cold already and recovered. I had mixed feelings about that. I mean, I'd kind of been looking forward to doing it.

He did let me help him analyze the tracking data and put together the maps.

It was fun, a completely different way to think about tracks--instead of walking along and looking, I had to rely on photographs and descriptions by people who didn't know what they were looking for. I couldn't look for additional evidence and I couldn't rely on my intuition to put together a scene, since I wasn't actually there. On the other hand, I could see the overview, all the tracks and signs the participants had found over an area several hundred feet on a side. That really made the stories, how the animals were interacting with each other, stand out.

I did most of the work, but with Charlie leaning over my shoulder, making suggestions and occasional corrections. I think I did pretty well. I think I could lead the workshop, if I had to.

[Next Post: Monday, March 10th:Finishing the Book Project]

Part 5: Post 8: Environmentalism for Dummies

[Sorry this post is a day late--the baby was sick over the weekend and we all spent Sunday night in the hospital. Monday I had paying work to catch up on, and we're all exhausted. Thank--whatever it is one thanks--she's ok now.--D.]

I was on my way to lunch today when I found a feather, dark blue and black and white with stripes and splotches. It was just lying on the ground. I picked it up to look at it--the tip was kind of see-through, like the way a t-shirt gets when you've had it for too many years. I've been noticing feathers lately.There seem to be a lot of them on the ground. I was thinking I should maybe take this one back to my room and make an altar of my desk with it, the way Charlie does with pine cones and what-not. And right as I thought of him, Charlie walked by, also on his way to lunch.

"Hey, Charlie!" I called, on impulse, "Come look at this, this is cool." Almost as soon as I said it I regretted it, worried he wouldn't think much of an old feather. But he came over to me and I showed him what I'd found. "What kind is it?" I asked him, though I was pretty sure I actually knew.

"Blue jay," he told me, looking at it with some interest. I didn't regret calling him over anymore.

"Charlie, look at the tip--it's all sort of thread-bare. I've found five or six feathers like this in the last couple of weeks. I can't decide if it's unusual, or if I've only just now started seeing these things. I've never noticed thread-bare feathers before." Charlie's eyes lit a moment, an almost catlike excitement, but the rest of his face remained calm, focused. Calmly, he looked at the feather with me.

"That is something," he agreed. And I almost missed it. It took me a good couple of seconds before I did a kind of double-take. Charlie made a visible effort not to laugh at me.

"Oh, you mean it's 'Something,'?" I asked. In the class, Messing Around Outdoors, Charlie had given us a mysterious assignment to show him Something, and four weeks into the semester I don't think any of us had been able to figure out what he meant. He grinned and nodded. "But I wasn't meaning to attempt the assignment!" I protested, realizing, too late, that I shouldn't try to talk my teacher out of giving me credit for something. Sometimes I just can't shut up.

"Too bad," Charlie told me, lightly. "You get credit for it anyway."

"But why? What did I do right that Donna did wrong?" Donna had written up this pretty little note about a butterfly wing and a spider's web, but it had cut no mustard with Charlie. I didn't think he was going to tell me at first, he just looked at me oddly, like he knew a secret and was trying to figure out if I knew it, too.

"You showed me something, something you thought worth looking at," he told me, "not your best guess on what would get you a good grade, and not your thoughts projected into something. You let the world in."

I wasn't sure how to respond to this. I think I grinned nervously or something.

"Why is the feather like this?" I asked, finally. "Is it unusual that there seem to be so many?"

"What do you think? What's your best guess?"

"I don't know," I began. "Maybe feathers get like that when they brush against things? I'm pretty sure there weren't so many feathers earlier in the year. Are there more birds on campus now or something? Or has somebody been letting the cats out more often?"

"Good thinking. You're half-right. It's molting season. They can't grow new feathers and breed at the same time, and they can't grow new feathers while they're migrating. New feathers must be metabolically expensive, or something. So they do it now, after the chicks fledge, between things. The wear on the tip is because the feather is old. It's an end-of-season feather. Kill sites usually have a lot of feathers, not just one at a time."

"Do blue jays migrate?" I asked in surprise. "I thought I saw some here last winter." Charlie shrugged.

"Some do, some don't. Nobody knows why." With another smile and a curt little nod, Charlie excused himself and went inside. I suppose he was hungry.

It's a curious thing--sometimes it seems so strange that Charlie is here. I mean here in a social or institutional sense, not here as in campus. Sometimes it seems like he must have popped out of the ground like some kind of male dryad, he belongs here in that sense, but he kind of sticks out among the others. He talks about science while pretty much everybody else talk about magic and mystery. Or Magick and Mystery, I suppose. I can hear the capital letters, almost, when Kit talks. But nobody else says "I don't know," or "nobody knows" as often as Charlie does. I know Mystery is a but different than mystery in the common sense, that it means a bit more, but I think not knowing--and trying to know--must be part of it.

Speaking of science, I wanted to talk about Environmentalism for Dummies, the other class I'm taking with Charlie this semester. In some ways it's the opposite of Messing Around Outdoors. The other one is the lighthearted, deceptively easy-looking thing, which this one is quite obviously a very hard class. There is a ton of homework, for example. Charlie reads voraciously and seems to think everyone else should, too. Fortunately, all our books for this class are popular science books, and very readable. In Intro to Ecology Charlie had us us reading a couple of actual research papers, alongside the books on the syllabus, because he was trying to introduce us to ecology as a discipline, as a structure. This time, though, it's all about content, and as the name implies, he's assuming at least some of his students are not interested in the science so he wants the content to be as accessible as possible. So that means popular science books written for ordinary people. We read and discus them, and Charlie fills in missing pieces during his lectures. We started out with Silent Spring and now we're into Song of the Dodo.

Rocking Llama in the Great Hall

We don't have enough of these books for us each to borrow one, and most of us are pretty close to broke so we can't buy them. Between our library, the town library, people buying their own copies, and Charlie getting a few to lend from previous students, we've collected about five copies of each of the books on our syllabus. Five books for fifteen people. Fortunately, we all live together,so that makes it easy to share. On Charlie's suggestion, we put all our books in a couple of milk crates in the Great Hall of the Mansion and we return them there whenever we're not reading.

The point of all this reading and discussion and lectures is to communicate the science behind the major environmental problems we hear about: pollution, extinction, invasive species, and global warming, mostly.

As Charlie said early in the course, "if your human mother was sick, you'd damn well want to find out why, right?"

[Next Post: Friday August 30: Complex Systems]

Second Interlude

Hi, it's me, Daniel-of-2013 again. And I have news. Not long ago, my wife and I welcomed our daughter to the world. I am, of course, protecting her privacy by not talking about her in any detail here, though as you can imagine I've been running around telling everybody I know personally all about her.

Maybe my slowness at getting pictures posted makes sense now? The fact of the matter is that I wrote up most of these posts ahead of time so I could keep up with my posting schedule through our baby's first few weeks by just editing a little, but I did not do any of the pictures ahead of time. I didn't think of it. So now I can't keep up. Painting takes time and a clean space to work, and these days I usually have neither. I'll get caught up later and post the pictures retroactively. That is my intention, anyway.

A few housekeeping notes.

First, for any readers who actually are birders, yes, Charlie's "listening to birds" exercise was both harder and easier than I thought it was at the time. There was a little more going on than I knew about. I won't elaborate now, since the details would probably bore anyone not perfectly capable of guessing on their own. Second, the extended workshop I referred to in my last post, the one that consisted of a trip to an island left just a few days after Beltane, but I'm going to present my posts about the trip slightly out of order. The reason is that I'm going to the same island this year, to see friends and to paint, and I want to post some of these paintings. I will therefore post about the island when I return, and while I'm gone I'll schedule several posts about events that actually happened after the trip. I don't think this anachronism will make much difference to the reader, but in the interests of accuracy I wanted to let you know. Third, I am not going to specify which island it is, other than to say it is publicly accessible and quite real. I may change a few minor details to discourage anyone guessing, since its location would be a clue as to the location of the school. And that I have agreed not to divulge.

It's interesting, looking over what I wrote so far, to see that my first dozen or so entries, those in "Part 1," are disproportionately about either Allen or Kit, while "Part 2" has been almost entirely about Charlie. In part, this is an artifact of space limitations. I was living the school every day all day, of course, and in writing this I have to reduce all of that experience to just a couple inches of text twice a week. I have had to include some events, in order to explain the setting and advance the plot, and that has left little room for other things that were equally important to me at the time. I did not stop looking up to Kit and Allen when I started looking up to Charlie. Furthermore, I actually spent only a minority of my time and energy thinking about and interacting with any faculty at all. If you had asked me then how I spent my time, I would have told you all about what I was doing with my friends--friends who were peers, I mean. But you can probably imagine my friendships with rough accuracy, as I don't think they were much different than the experience of any other young man--except that some of them were quite a bit older than I, because the age range of students was a lot greater than at most colleges. But the faculty, what they taught, and what they were like to work with, was unique, so far as I know. You couldn't imagine that, if I didn't tell you.

But it is true that I initially connected most with Kit and Allen out of all the staff. Before classes started in March, I rarely had any reason to spend a lot of time with any of the faculty, but Allen was an exception because he lead group therapy. And anyway, I spent a lot of time with Ollie and Ollie admired Allen and talked about him a lot. And of course, there was my crush on Kit. Then,over a number of weeks, I gradually grew curious about Charlie. I couldn't have said why, and I still can't explain why the curiosity started; he was a remarkable man, but I don't think I had any way of knowing that at the beginning.

Charlie liked to say that there are many possible ways to section reality to make a story. He meant "section" as in "conic section." If you take a solid cone, maybe made out of clay or ice cream or something solid but soft, and you slice through it, the sliced open face shows a two-dimensional shape. If you cut straight across horizontally, you get a circle. If you cut at an angle, you get an egg-shape. And so on. All these shapes you can get by cutting a cone are called conic sections, a fact that is utterly insignificant to most people, though I get a kick out of the idea. Anyway, Charlie meant that reality is to a story what that cone is to a two-dimensional slice. And in writing this story, I am constantly aware that I am sectioning reality, and that there are many other possible sections, other stories, that would be equally true.

Just like last time I broke in to comment like this, I'm concerned that this section I have chosen to slice may be presenting one of my professors inaccurately. I worry that I may have made Charlie come off as pretty humorless. Actually, he was a very funny, very playful man, it's just that he didn't joke around much with people he didn't know well, and thirteen years ago that included me. The other problem is that back then I didn't know enough about his world to get a lot of his jokes. I'd seen him joke or play pranks a few times that spring, but it was only later, sometimes years later, that I really understood everything that he'd said, that I really got the whole joke. So I haven't included any of those anecdotes because there is no way I can describe them fully from the perspective I had back then.

I left the roof off in this drawing because I never got a good look at it.

 I'll tell one now, in order to correct the record, but to do that I have to describe Chapel Hall a bit, first. I didn't do that earlier when I was describing the rest of campus, because I was writing about a time before classes started when I hadn't actually been in Chapel Hall very much.

From the outside, Chapel Hall looked, as I said, very collegiate, meaning that it was built of red brick with white trim and looked formal and decorative at once. It was an essentially cubic building, with four cupolas mostly used by ravens. Inside it was deliberately confusing.

The whole building was almost perfectly bilaterally symmetrical, so that there were two main doors and two sets of stairways, one of either side of the building, east-west. Most of the building was also symmetrical north-south, so that it was easy to get disoriented once you were inside. The ground floor had an almost open floor plan. The offices for some of the staff members were there, but there were a lot of internal windows so that sunlight could reach in and you could walk from one external door to the other, though not in a straight line. On the floor in the middle of that hallway was a large solar seal. Dust floated in stray sunbeams and the smell of old books.

But the other three floors were all dominated by the auditorium, the original chapel itself. It started on the second floor, but its ceiling was two and a half stories high. So if you were on the second floor, there would be the auditorium and also several classrooms and some restrooms off to either side. But if you went up to the third floor, the classrooms on the west side were completely cut off from those on the east side by the upper part of the chapel. We all spent our first week or so of classes constantly running up and down stairs because we had classes on the third floor and kept forgetting which side, east or west, we had to go to. And once up the wrong stairway, there was no way to get to the other side of the building without going either up or down.

The fourth floor was equally screwy, but in a very different way. You could get through, by walking over the top of the chapel, except the chapel had a curved ceiling so the fourth floor had a hump in it. The humped area was always referred to as the fourth-and-a-half floor. To cross from one side of the building to the other up there, you went up a couple of steps, over maybe twenty feet, and down a couple more steps.

Wait--how did all the rooms have windows? They did!

 But all this was not enough confusion for our school, so the fourth (and fourth-and-a-half) floor was divided into a warren of small, interconnecting classrooms, without a central hallway. To get to your class, you had to thread the maze. And the rooms up there had names, not numbers, and the names changed every year. When someone told a story from the previous year that had happened in one of those rooms, he or she always used the old name, as though the rooms, and not just the names, were changing.

The fourth floor was up near the roof of the building; when it rained hard in the summer you could hear the drops hit, very loud, on the roof. And some of the ceilings sloped, because the roof sloped. Where the slope dropped the ceiling down to five feet, there were dividing walls, but on the other side of those walls were eve spaces used for storage that could be accessed through cabinet doors cut into the wall. And there were no internal dividers in the eves, so once you got in there you could creep, unseen, from one class room to another.

So, once I was in class--I forget whether it was Psychology class and Kit was there as a guest speaker, or if it was a workshop Kit and Allen were team-teaching, but either way they were both there and we were in one of those rooms next to the eves. And suddenly Charlie leaped out of one of the cabinet doors.

“Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!” he shouted, school robes swirling.

He was teaching a class in the neighboring room, and had crept soundlessly through the eve space. Kit startled beautifully with a shriek that made Charlie’s students in the other room laugh, but Kit was incidental to the joke; I'm not even sure Charlie had known she would be there. She and Charlie rarely interacted unless Allen was present, since he was friends with both of them. Allen had jumped, though he didn’t shriek, and then he busted up laughing. He had this awesome, boyish laugh. There were multiple students who would go really far out of their way to get Allen to laugh.

Kit didn’t laugh. Instead, she glared at Charlie.

“Oh, please. They would have burnt you, too,” she said, dismissively. Charlie raised his chin a fraction and his eyes flashed. Then he half-grinned.

“Fire?” he said, nonchalantly, “I’m not afraid of a little disturbance.” And he left the way he had come, closing the cabinet door behind him.

At the time I thought he was simply giving Kit a hard time for being scared, though Kit wasn’t scared, only startled. I don’t think Kit was ever scared of anything. But I found out later that fire is what ecologists call a disturbance. Unlike the rest of us, who tend to think of the world as groups of objects, ecologists think of the world as patterns and patterns of patterns in both space and time. To most of us, a forest is an object and so a fire is the end of that object. To Charlie and to people like him, fire is only another iteration of the pattern. Seen this way, Charlie's comment is not just a pun at Kit's expense, but has all these other meanings. I'm pretty sure that Kit and Allen both understood what he meant. They were his colleagues, and Kit had once been his student.But none of the rest of us got it. We'd heard Charlie talk about disturbance histories in class, and some of us had heard the phrase in high school, but we had so much else to think about and learn that studying ecology hadn't yet influenced our habits of thought. I didn't learn how to think like an ecologist until several years later, and I think some of the others never did. For them, science was the arcane, the real occult, hidden in plain sight by misunderstanding and lack of interest.

Trust my teacher to embed his jokes several layers deep in a field most of the rest of us didn’t study.

[Next Post: Friday, May 3rd: Beltane]