2014: the proudest moment

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2014: The Best & Worst This is the time of the year when writers coast. They dream up their totally subjective best and worse lists for the year that's rapidly coming to a close. Why? So they can focus on the important things...the holidays. So with that in mind:

To close out the old year, my proudest moment. It's you Ellie, a.k.a. Rachael Eliot. Knew you were quirky smart, bird nerdy, Star Trekkie with a nod towards Mr. Data, voracious tome reader, cook extraordinaire. So proud of your first semester at UT, you're 4.0 perfect, honors calculus, autodidactic mathematician—who says the girl's got no math—plus highest class average in accelerated chemistry. Yes, I believed the quirky smarts would come into focus some day, but research computational chemist? So, who knew? A wunderkind.

Proud of your work ethic, your grit and determination, your focus, your long hours and the fire that burns within. Also proud of the part I played helping you find you.

But your Mom is your real hero. 

Your second semester awaits. Eyes on the prize, full speed ahead. “Courage is a kind of salvation. Courage is knowing what not to fear.” - Plato  

Proud. Proud. Proud. Or as Danny Thomas said, “No man stands so tall as when he stoops to help a child.”

Happy New Year. Bring on 2015. 

 

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2014: favorite moment inside a cave

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2014: The Best & Worst This is the time of the year when writers coast. They dream up their totally subjective best and worse lists for the year that's rapidly coming to a close. Why? So they can focus on the important things...the holidays. So with that in mind:


Being that I have the best job in Knoxville, in part because I get to spend a lot of time with kids. And there's no better kids than Ijams Summer Day Camp kids and there's no better time than venturing into a dark old spooky cave. Just ask Tom Sawyer.

In July, we had a most excellent caving adventure with Barcus, international treasure hunter and dealer of antiquities. 

It was certainly my best moment of the entire year inside a cave in the company of second, third and fourth graders. Right kids!

For more about the adventure click: In search of lost time.

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2014: favorite book

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2014: The Best & Worst This is the time of the year when writers coast. They dream up their totally subjective best and worse lists for the year that's rapidly coming to a close. Why? So they can focus on the important things...the holidays. So with that in mind:


OK. It's an odd choice with an odd title, Horseshoe Crabs and Velvet Worms published in 2012. It probably never appeared on the New Your Times Bestseller List.

Yet my favorite book of the year comes with an enticing subtitle, "The Story of the Animals and Plants That Time Has Left Behind." That's what lured me in, that and that most excellent cover design. Tenacious lifeforms, millions of years and still going strong, what a perfectly interesting read, and it also proved to be in the hands of a skilled writer.

It's part natural history and part global travelogue as author Richard Fortey takes us in search of very old, old life on Earth just abiding their time. Not only to the Delaware Bay as horseshoe crabs come ashore to lay eggs, but Fortey takes us to ginkos tucked away in a remote valley in China and velvet worms inside a log in New Zealand and lungfish muddling ashore in Australia. Not fossils, but living fossils, quietly living their unheralded lives, year after year after year. Steadfast.  

"I like to think of the double helix of the DNA that proves the shared ancestry of the simplest of prokaryotic organisms with the bison and her baby as a kind of plaited twine weaving through the tree of life," writes Fortey. "But bound together by the twine of descent as they are, every one of these living beings still has its own biology, and every biography could be as interesting as that of any organism I have selected for this book. No ant is too small to fail to deserve our attention, no microbe too hard to understand, no fungus too obscure, nor any flower too evanescent." 

"The richness of the biological world is the most wonderful feature of the biosphere, and every story is worth the telling no matter how humble, or indeed insular, is the organism concerned," adds Fortey.

Indeed, all life is insular, including the one typing on this keyboard, but yet no man is an island and all life is unequivocally connected through that shared ancestry.

After reading this book, my family tree got immensely bigger.

Thank you. 

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2014: best ocean in a box

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2014: The Best & Worst This is the time of the year when writers coast. They dream up their totally subjective best and worse lists for the year that's rapidly coming to a close. Why? So they can focus on the important things...the holidays. So with that in mind:


Mai iloko mai.

Everyone should get a Christmas present they didn't want, don't think they need or would ever use but then fall in love with. It's humbling. E hana me ka ha`aha`a. It teaches you that you don't know you as well as you think you do. (Wow! Broke all kinds of rules. Used "you" in a sentence five time.)

This year for me, that gift was an ASTI Adaptive Sound Sleep Therapy System, or, as I call it, nature in a box. Moi inoino. Now every night I can drift off to sleep listening to rain, a babbling brook, a waterfall, a nighttime meadow or ocean surf, plus there's settings for train, city and fireplace sounds (a little unnerving), all at the turn of a dial.

Tonight, I think I'll dial Maui and fall asleep listening to the Pacific. I hear humpback whales are passing to the north of Kahului. Aloha ahiahi ia oukou. 

E pili mau na pomaika`i ia `oe.

Mahalo nui loa, Suzy.

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2014: best bird outing(s)

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Look Rock in the Smokies. Photo by Jimmy Tucker

2014: The Best & Worst This is the time of the year when writers coast. They dream up their totally subjective best and worse lists for the year that's rapidly coming to a close. Why? So they can focus on the important things...the holidays. So with that in mind:

We had several enduring bird outings this past year at Ijams, at Forks-of-the-River, at Seven Islands, at Hiwassee, at Fort Loudoun and a very, very cold one at Cove Lake. But the Ijams' Birding & Breakfast Club Hawk Watch Brunch in September at Look Rock and Osprey Nest Watch Brunch in June at Sequoyah Hills were especially memorable. The birding and breakfast brunches tend to be leisurely affairs with generous helpings of food and bird chat.

Thanks to all. 

And there's more to come in 2015, almost always on the second Saturday of the month, the first is Saturday, January 10, an indoor chat about "Winter Birds" with breakfast by Peg at Ijams. And then on February 14: a roadshow brunch to Hiwassee to look for cranes and eagles.

Osprey on nest in June. Photo by Vickie Henderson

Osprey Nest Watch. Photo by Cindy Moffett

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2014: favorite retro moment

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2014: The Best & Worst This is the time of the year when writers coast. They dream up their totally subjective best and worse lists for the year that's rapidly coming to a close. Why? So they can focus on the important things...the holidays. So with that in mind:


Maybe...we need a little Disco.

Bad news. Bad news. Bad news. Cuban missile crisis. The JFK assassination. Vietnam War. Protests in the streets. RFK assassination. MLK assassination. More protests in the streets. Watergate. President forced to resign. Disco came at the end of years of bad, troubling news. The nation simply wanted to party and forget it all. Pretty much as soon as President Nixon resigned and waved goodbye from the White House lawn, the disco ball began to sparkle.

Late last summer, after months of bad news—I won't do a laundry list, you know it as well as I—it was time to escape for awhile. The answer was two or three nights of Jive Talkin, Boogie Nights, Boogie Oogie Oogie, Disco Inferno and the most wonderful Donna Summer.

Did you know that the original LP version of "Love to Love You Baby" is over 16 minutes long?

Best tonic. Best mindless escape. Best retro moment of the year.

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2014: most thankful moment(s)

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2014: The Best & Worst This is the time of the year when writers coast. They dream up their totally subjective best and worse lists for the year that's rapidly coming to a close. Why? So they can focus on the important things...the holidays. So with that in mind:


And on a personal note of glad tidings: Thank goodness it's Christmas because the summer/fall proved to be uncommonly difficult: three trips to the emergency room, one three-night stay in the hospital, one seven-night stay in the hospital and finally a 10-week stay in a nursing home for my Mom. Four hard months.

Thank you my friends Laura Twilley and Cindy Moffett (pictured above) for helping me maintain twice weekly 24 hummingbird feeders at the nature center during the summer heat. That's hundreds of cleanings and gallons of sugar water. Sticky fingers nous tous. The two dozen feeders were scattered around weeks ahead of time for the Hummingbird Festival in late August. Not enough hours in the day for me.

And thank you Island Home Health and Rehab for nursing Mom back to health and getting her feet under her again after a couple bouts of pneumonia. 

Doctors, nurses, CNAs, therapists, rest of staff, you all are selfless angels for the things you do each and every day for all the seniors under your care. Angels. Angels. Angels.

Merry Christmas, Laura, Cindy, health care givers, angels all. 


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2014: best of seasoned greetings

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Startled, they looked towards the flock of crows to the west
completely ignoring the man 
with the camera hidden in the bushes behind them.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays.

Spend time with someone you love, 
and/or go outside. 
And if you are very lucky, you might encounter 
a trio of well seasoned, Yule log-deers.

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2014: favorite moment in a creek

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2014: The Best & Worst This is the time of the year when writers coast. They dream up their totally subjective best and worse lists for the year that's rapidly coming to a close. Why? So they can focus on the important things...the holidays. So with that in mind:


We're lucky at the nature center. We have several ponds, a lake, a creek and we border the Tennessee River, perfect for the TN Naturalist @ Ijams class called Tennessee Waters: Aquatic Systems.

My favorite moment in a creek came on a hot Saturday at the end of summer. We waded down Toll Creek searching for whatever aquatic life we could find. And had a good time splashing around in the water like the overgrown kids most naturalists are.

For more photos, click: Aquatic Systems. 

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2014: favorite magazine article

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2014: The Best & Worst This is the time of the year when writers coast. They dream up their totally subjective best and worse lists for the year that's rapidly coming to a close. Why? So they can focus on the important things...the holidays. So with that in mind:


My favorite magazine article of the year came in November. The cover story in National Geographic was the creepiest, oddest, weirdest, strangest, most macabre, yet most fascinating—and you can arrange those descriptors in any order you like—I have ever read. It's a "Tales from the Crypt" kind of thing; and I have been reading the yellow-bordered Nat Geo for decades.
 
Real Zombies: The Strange Science of the Living Dead by Carl Zimmer is bizarre with a capital B.

For more details, click: zombie bugs.

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2014: best snapshot moment

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Woe is me.

2014: The Best & Worst This is the time of the year when writers coast. They dream up their totally subjective best and worse lists for the year that's rapidly coming to a close. Why? So they can focus on the important things...the holidays. So with that in mind:


Snapshots happen in an instant. This one came in September.

The little eastern screech-owl at the nature center had been sickly, poor baby. Using a syringe, we had to give her liquid oral antibiotics twice a day for several weeks. It wasn't easy. She was stubbornly tight-lipped about the subject.

She had also just stepped out of her shower (we call it rain) when it was time for yet more medicine. Woe is me. Looking at her on my outstretched hand, I saw this precious moment and quickly reached for my cell phone. Look at those stolid eyes.

The greatness of photography is that it does capture a single moment in time holding it ad infinitum.

And now, four months later, she's recovered and doing just fine. I fed her only a few hours ago. (One mouse, shaken not stirred.)

For the original posting, click:  bath time.  

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2014: most manly wild discovery

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2014: The Best & Worst This is the time of the year when writers coast. They dream up their totally subjective best and worse lists for the year that's rapidly coming to a close. Why? So they can focus on the important things...the holidays. So with that in mind:


We know Old Spice. It's the scent of grandfather. Or the fragrance seamen splashed on when they came back to port. But how long had they been on the ship?

Neither seems that appealing.

But this year I discovered the same venerable brand has come up with a collection of scents for naturalists. Outdoorsy guys. The Old Spice Wild Collection with even wilder names: HAWKRIDGE, LIONPRIDE, FOXCREST, WOLFTHORN, and the hard to comprehend, BEARGLOVE. (They seem to prefer all caps, as if the name is shouted. Manly.)

I'm from the Great Smokies, never saw a bear wearing gloves, but I'm fine if they so attire, just don't put track shoes on them. 

And body wash? Or "nettoyant pour le corps" for those roughed French Canadians. I thought men just used sandpaper or steel wool. But, you know, out in the woods, a guy wants to fit in. I've tried them all, haven't really noticed a change in how I am perceived or camouflaged. Lions do not follow me. Not seen a wolf at the door, a fox on the run.

Today, I answered "the smell of the wild with Old Spice HAWKRIDGE." I was going to feed the hawk. It seemed a no-brainer. She didn't seem to mind or object or want to go out for coffee. Just so you know: The hawk herself doesn't seem to even have a scent. But, did she hawkeye me a bit differently?

Have I been sucker punched by a bear wearing gloves?    




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2014: best werewolf moment

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Unmasking the truth about nature's monsters.

2014: The Best & Worst This is the time of the year when writers coast. They dream up their totally subjective best and worse lists for the year that's rapidly coming to a close. Why? So they can focus on the important things...the holidays. So with that in mind:


Persecuted. All wolves disappeared from the Tennessee forests over a century ago, or did they?

My best moment as a howlin' mad Canidae came when the summer camp kids unmasked my inner werewolf in July.

The Nature Day Camp kids at Ijams calmed the beast down with gentle tones and acceptance. Monster Monster Camp is designed to teach kids that everything in nature that might seem like a monster, truly isn't. As FDR said, "The only thing to fear is fear itself." 

My problem with the intense localized lycanthropy (a delusion in which one imagines oneself to be a wolf or other wild animal from the Greek lykoi, meaning "wolf" and anthropos, meaning "man") came with the Super Moon in mid-summer, but the camp kids came to my rescue.

For more on this turn of events click: Southside werewolf.

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2014: the strangest moment

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2014: The Best & Worst This is the time of the year when writers coast. They dream up their totally subjective best and worse lists for the year that's rapidly coming to a close. Why? So they can focus on the important things...the holidays. So with that in mind:


2014 saw the strangest thing in a very long time!

I have been running around in the woods for a very, very, very (yes, three verys) long time and I had never seen anything like what I encountered in June.

At first glance, it simply looked like a bird's down feather, recently molted and clinging to a branch. But on closer inspection, there were more than one. And, they appeared to be crawling. Nature fact #207: Feathers don't crawl.

For more info, click: mystery

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2014: biggest disappointment

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2014: The Best & Worst This is the time of the year when writers coast. They dream up their totally subjective best and worse lists for the year that's rapidly coming to a close. Why? So they can focus on the important things...the holidays. So with that in mind:

This is going to upset a lot of people, but I finally settled in last February to read all 822 pages of  Moby Dick; or, The Whale. Aptly named by Melville, the book is a whale, a leviathan adventure filled with a lot of Biblical references, good and evil, evil and good. 

Savage nature, remorseless fang, must be subdued, nigh killed. 

But, the overriding question posed in the 136 chapters is not "Will obsessed Ahab get the Great White Whale?" But, "Hadn't manuscript editors been invented in 1851?"

Thomas Wolfe wrote voluminously as well, but his editor Maxwell Perkins cut over 90,000 words from "Look Homeward, Angel." And did we miss them? 
 
Moby Dick starts well, very dark and moody, very Hawthornean. Queequeg, Ishmael, Starbuck, Ahab and even the Pequod are introduced, all wonderful characters, especially he noble savage Queequeg, so tainted by his time with "civilized men" that he can never return home to his birthright and unspoiled island.

And Melville can write, “At such times, under an abated sun; afloat all day upon smooth, slow heaving swells; seated in his boat, light as a birch canoe; and so sociably mixing with the soft waves themselves, that like hearth-stone cats they purr against the gunwale; these are the times of dreamy quietude, when beholding the tranquil beauty and brilliancy of the ocean's skin, one forgets the tiger heart that pants beneath it; and would not willingly remember, that this velvet paw but conceals a remorseless fang.”

But as a writer, Melville soon realized he had a problem: It was going to take Ahab a long time to chase down Moby Dick, months and months. And great sea voyages are mostly tedious affairs. So Melville had to come up with a lot of tedium, everything whale related imaginable from “minutest seminal germs” to the “coil of his bowels.” He even threw in what dictionary he used to write the tome: a huge quarto edition of Johnson, thus disguising the tediousness with obtuseness.

Melville writes in chapter 104, “Since I have undertaken to manhandle this Leviathan, it behooves me to approve myself omnisciently exhaustive in the enterprise; not overlooking the minutest seminal germs of his blood, and spinning him out to the uttermost coil of his bowels. Having already described him in most of his present habitatory and anatomical peculiarities, it now remains to magnify him in an archaeological, fossiliferous, and antediluvian point of view. Applied to any other creature than the Leviathan - to an ant or a flea - such portly terms might justly be deemed unwarrantably grandiloquent. But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this emprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me.”

Well, fain am I, but that whale of a paragraph is one of many that should have been cut. 

Unwarrantably (not justifiable) grandiloquent (a lofty, extravagantly colorful, pompous, or bombastic style, manner, or quality especially in language.) He was concerned how we deemed it and I deemed it omnisciently exhaustive! 

Well, call me exhausted! But I did finish all 822 pages and in the end was ready to fling myself into the water. Let Moby do what he may. 

 And just so you know, the dictionary I keep close at hand is my Merriam-Webster's Collegiate, Eleventh Edition. 

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2014: most bewildering moment

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2014: The Best & Worst This is the time of the year when writers coast. They dream up their totally subjective best and worse lists for the year that's rapidly coming to a close. Why? So they can focus on the important things...the holidays. So with that in mind:


This may shock your sensibilities, but there was a time when if you wanted to listen to music, you got up off the sofa and stepped over to your stereo and turned it on. Took 20 seconds. Or if you wanted to watch television, you walked to your TV, pushed a button and it came on. If the channel was not to your liking, you turned a knob—click, click, click—to a more favorable program.  Maybe 35 seconds.

Those were the days. Label me a Luddite.

Today, I spend far more time jusy searching for the remote. My most bewildering moment of 2014 started simple enough. I had lost the TV remote yet again so I began to rummage around looking for it, under the sofa pillows, on the coffee table, in the Lazy Boy. Then I dug around the entertainment center, home of the TV, stereo, turntable, DVD player and, yes, a still working VCR. 

I was shaken. It seems remotes have a built-in piece of software that makes them want to hide and apparently reproduce. 

By the time I had completed my great remote roundup and spread them out before me, I had found nine. But even more intimidating were the 300-plus buttons that if pushed, something was supposed to happen. But what? Yes, over 300 buttons, staring at me begging for a decision.

But, all I wanted to do was watch a football game. Do I really need over 300 buttons just to be entertained? 

I checked with NASA. The now retired space shuttle had less than 100 buttons on its control panel and it flew to space and back, even docked with the International Space Station. 

But of course, that's 1980s technology, and things were so archaic then. And my TV only picked up four channels.

Good night Mrs. Calabash, wherever you are. 

Somehow, I'll bet you are looking for your remote.    

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2014: best history moment

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High Ground Park: Fort Higley

2014: The Best & Worst This is the time of the year when writers coast. They dream up their totally subjective best and worse lists for the year that's rapidly coming to a close. Why? So they can focus on the important things...the holidays. So with that in mind:


The most memorable history hike of the year came in May. 
 
The Ijams Hiking Club explored a portion of the Knoxville Urban Wilderness: Battlefield Loop south of the river and UT. We went to the Civil War sites of High Ground Park and Fort Higley, then on to River Bluff and the best view of the city. 

Fort Higley was quiet the day we were there, but it was pretty quiet during the war as well. It was built in 1863 by the Union Army to overlook the city and river after the battle of Fort Sanders just in case the vanquished Southern Army attempted to retake Knoxville. But the high location never saw any real fighting, the Confederate Army had been truly driven away.

For more details of our hike, click: High Ground.

View towards downtown Knoxville

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2014: best yard sale find

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2014: The Best & Worst This is the time of the year when writers coast. They dream up their totally subjective best and worse lists for the year that's rapidly coming to a close. Why? So they can focus on the important things...the holidays. So with that in mind:


Please do not tell the author that I bought his book at a yard sale. I am an author. If you buy one of my books in some one's yard, keep it private. Authors want to think of their books being loved and cherished, lying on a nightstand or there on the bookshelf beside "To Kill a Mockingbird" and "The Color Purple."

Yet, I did buy In Search of Robinson Crusoe by Tim Severin at the Ijams Yard Sale in November. The book's concept seemed fascinating: the background behind Defoe's classic novel of the shipwrecked, marooned Crusoe. First published in 1719, it was based on an actual marooned castaway and was an overnight success. And it's "still in print," sweet words to any author.

Daniel Defoe himself was most phoenix-like, he rose from his own ashes many times. Severin writes, "Highly intelligent and ferociously hard-working, he was willing to turn his hand at almost any occupation. Yet his schemes rarely worked out quite as he hoped. His first enthusiasm had been commerce. He tried in turn to make money by wholesaling hosiery, then by underwriting insurance, and finally by running a brick and tile factory. When all these businesses miscarried, he turned to journalism, financial speculation, and a murky career as a spy, agent provocateur, and political protagonist for both the main political parties of the day. In the course of his activities he wrote numerous political pamphlets, and also a book on moral instruction, which had sold very well. His robust literary style, vigorous wit, and a delight in exchanging strokes in the political fray meant that he spent much of his life gyrating from one crisis to the next."

"Twice bankrupt, he had been pursued through the courts for debt and sedition or on false charges made by his enemies. A warrant issued for his arrest on a charge of seditious libel in 1703 describes him as "a middle sized spare man, about 40 years old, of brown complexion, and dark brown-coloured hair, but wears a wig, a hooked nose, a sharp chin, gray eyes, a mole near his mouth."...Defoe was exposed for three days in the public pillory. Famously, the London mob who approved of his satirical view of the failings of the government and the judicial system escorted him to the pillory, decorated it with flowers, drank his health, and bought copies of a satirical poem that Defoe had penned with typical feistiness while waiting for the sentence to be carried out...finally Defoe launched yet another career: at the age of 59, with a wife and six grown up children, he became a novelist."

Ergo, when all else fails, write a novel. Perhaps you'll get rescued from your own marroonedness. [Don't look it up. Not a real word.] 

Severin's book about buccaneers, shipwrecks and castaways [which happened more often than you might think in the 1700s] proved the jacket promo copy on the cover to be true—"A fascinating read...Blending travel narrative, maritime history and a literary mystery."

But, please don't ask me what I paid for it. It was far too little for such an interesting read. And, yes, the hard-working author received nothing. They rarely do. Such a shame. If you are out there Tim contact me. I will happily send you a royalty check.

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2014: best Frankenstein moment

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2014: The Best & Worst This is the time of the year when writers coast. They dream up their totally subjective best and worse lists for the year that's rapidly coming to a close. Why? So they can focus on the important things...the holidays. So with that in mind:

My best moment as a monster cobbled together from various parts of stolen cadavers came in July when it was revealed that my inner Frankenstein was not only afraid of fire, but he was also fearful of snakes.

The Nature Day Camp kids at Ijams came to my rescue. Monster Monster Camp is designed to teach kids that everything in nature that might seem like a monster, truly isn't. As FDR said, "The only thing to fear is fear itself."

We went on a snake hunt and discovered that snakes are far more curious than fearful. Just odd little creatures, not monsters. Certainly they were nothing to make you run from the village screaming for the Bürgermeister. 

My inner Frankenstein thanks you for not burning down his windmill. He also thanks Mary Shelley who created him.

For more on this turn of events click: Misunderstood!

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