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Diner Tips

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This year I came back for my third semester of working at the diner. My co-workers are nice and it’s a fairly simple job. You smile at people and hand them their food. Most of the students here are polite. The only trouble is when you get your pleasantries mixed up. For example, if a customer says, “Have a good shift” and you say “You too.” Of course, the second after you say it you realize that they don’t have a shift and you wince a little. You meant to say something nice; you just used the wrong words.

We’re getting a lot of new people at the diner this month so I thought I’d write some tips on how to work there. Like I said, it’s relatively simple. As a student worker, all you really have to do is have a positive attitude and show up passably awake. That being said, here are my tips.

  • Be yourself. I heard this at the customer service training session we did and it seems worth repeating. Customers don’t want to be served by a robot or someone who sounds like the lady on their GPS. For one thing that lady is really bossy. This may happen in the next fifty years as technology progresses, but in the meantime feel free to relax and joke around a little.
  • Don’t cut towards your fingers. If you do, you may find yourself with one less.
  • Eat before your shift. Or else you could end up trying to cram a cold tortilla into your mouth during the one o’clock rush. Trust me, it’s not good.
  • Bring comfortable shoes. This job is all standing.
  • If you’re spraying the warming pan on top of the stove and the stove is on, a jet of fire may shoot up. This looks really cool but make sure to get your hand out of the way if you don’t want it charbroiled.

I hope these were helpful and I look forward to seeing you at the diner, either as a co-worker or as a customer. If you say “have a good shift,” I’ll be the one who says “you too.”

Solitude

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I was in Seattle a few weeks ago, where I met up with a friend from the university. He picked me up from my downtown hotel and we drove to Beth’s Cafe, a breakfast restaurant known for its 12-egg omelets and the crayon drawings that line its walls. The drawings showcase a range of artistic styles, from remarkable reproductions of Elsa (of Frozen fame) to Dalí-esque surrealisms. My favorite drawing was of two stick bugs, wading through a puddle of rainwater that had accumulated in a crack in the sidewalk. The bugs were indistinct brown sticks, each with six legs. The drawing struck me because it appeared to be the work of six year old who used too much purple crayon. Yet it evoked solitude with an intensity unmatched by any other drawing that I saw. It may have been the color, or a combination of color and visual understatement, but the figures of the two stick bugs seemed to represent a shared lonesomeness.

We finished our meals and drove to nearby Green Lake. There was a boat rental hut, where we rented a blue two-person pedal-boat. We hopped into the water and got into the boat that was waiting for us. I tightened my life-vest, and we began to pedal. There was more resistance than I expected, and I felt my thighs tighten as we pedaled out onto the water, leaving a V-shaped trail of ripples behind us. We talked about our summers. I spent a lot of my summer alone in a library. It’s not a bad thing. Alone, but not lonely. I realized that college, for all the social attention, often is a solitary activity. I study with friends less often than I did in high school. I eat lunch, and sometimes dinner, alone, which, I should stress, is not a bad thing. I think college calls for a healthy amount of solitude. Of course, it also calls for interaction, but I think that solitude is underrated.

In the middle of Green Lake, my friend and I drifted, our feet drying upon the pedals of our $18/hour rented pedal-boat. We weren’t especially thin, having eaten more than our fair share of eggs, hash browns, and bacon, but in every other way we were like the purple stick bugs of a six year old, alone on a boat in the middle of a lake. I could have sighed and my breath would have vibrated the water.

That Lizzie Life: A Summer in Roma!

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Hello first semester of senior year! It’s good to be back. This summer was particularly eventful; I spent the first half of it living that Lizzie McGuire life abroad in Italy! Last semester, I was lucky enough to have made it into a brand new connections class called Rome: Sketchbooks and Space. This class was based in the study and appreciation of ancient Roman art and architecture, focusing heavily on sacred spaces and the utilization of space as a whole. Throughout the semester each student also worked on a sketchbook with weekly entries. As an art major, I thoroughly enjoyed this aspect of the class, though it wasn’t all art majors in the class. The classroom part of the course was very interesting… but the best part was going to Italy for the first three weeks of summer.

You heard me, Italy! Our entire class lived in Rome– along with our fabulous professor and official guardian angel, Elise Richman– and worked in the Rome Center studio spaced owned by the University of Washington. The Rome Center was right in the middle of the beautiful Campo di Fiori, a bustling marketplace during the day and vibrant city life scene at night. I used to sit in this one particular windowsill and look out onto the square… and people used to take pictures of me in my little spot! I guess it is pretty rare to see a redhead in Rome. Here’s the view I had from that windowsill one night as the sun was setting. Stunning. 11390041_10153300221982778_8003798161520122779_n

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To Unknowable Heights

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On the last day of finals week last semester, a friend and I, to celebrate the end of the school year, drove to North Bend and hiked Rattlesnake Ridge. We got there early, before the morning fog had lifted, and so, for the most part, we hiked in a cloud. Though the sun was out by the time we’d reached the ridge’s 3,500-foot peak, the fog covered the surrounding areas so that, where we should have seen the forest and Rattlesnake Lake below, we saw only gray. There were others at the peak, taking pictures, sitting on lawn chairs, and watching the rodents scramble across the rocks. My friend and I found a ledge near the edge of the peak and sat, as wisps of fog passed around us. I pulled out a couple of granola bars and we ate.

I wish the fog would go away, my friend says. The view is incredible. And it puts how high we are in perspective.

A part of me wishes that I could see the view, too. But the sensation of being a kilometer above ground doesn’t abandon me. I gaze into the impenetrable fog from my perch.

I don’t know, I say. The not being able to see is kind of cool. In a sense, it makes me feel that we’re even higher. Too high to see the ground.

My friend unlatches his camera bag. He points to a chipmunk, nibbling a nut on a pedestal-like rock. For an instant, the chipmunk looks at us, long enough for my friend to take a picture, then it darts over the ledge and slips into the fog.

I stand and peer over the ledge. There’s no trace of the chipmunk. Then I notice a man, walking on a thin outcropping of rock on the side of the cliff.

Check this out, I say.

My friend stands and looks in the direction of the man.

That guy’s insane, I say.

He must not be afraid of heights.

The man lowers himself and sits with his back against the mountain-face. He hugs his knees to his chest and leans forward. As he cranes his neck to see the trees below, a thick cloud of fog envelops and shrouds him from view.

We watch. The fog thickens around the mountainside. Then we hear a scream, muted by the cloud, as if from a distance, and it echoes down the mountain, into the valley, and ripples over the lake. I think the worst. I think, This man has fallen to his death.

The people turn. They inch their way to the edge of the peak, as if afraid to see what awaits their eyes below.

The cloud of fog passes. The man still sits on the narrow strip of rock on the side of the mountain. The people let out sighs of relief. He shivers. There’s sweat, or dew, on his forehead, but he’s there. I sit back down and lean against the rock. I realize that what I thought was a scream was a shout, or a cheer, his thrill at sitting blindly in a cloud, at knowing but not seeing, and seeing what we don’t know.

We watch the fog pass beneath us like a slowly moving stream and imagine that we’re on an island, floating in the sky.

The Independent Life

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Last November I made the decision to life off-campus. I thought THIS is what college is about! That THIS is independence that so many people at UPS do this, why not me? Luckily I already had five other friends I knew I would want to live with. That my friend, Nihal already has the experience to house-search, setting up bills and everything. Our house search was basically set up by her, since she spent that year living off campus she knew what to look for and what we should consider. There were many factors including- having six rooms, near to campus (or well reasonable since four of them had cars), cost and size of the house. We started our search through the trusted off-campus house search directory through our University. All the property owners/managers are trusted by the University and know they are offering housing to college students and have a good response from previous students experiences.

The Sea from Different Shores

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The sea in Hawaii is as green as it is blue and rides onto mounds of golden sand, molded by the feet of passerby who carry their shoes and roll up their jeans. Waves overlap waves like sheets of ice floating on the Antarctic sea, sliding over one another like clouds. The sea leaves behind flowers of foam on the sand, which dissolve under the heat of the sun. At dusk, the sea sings the colors of the sunset, purple and red and hazel under balmy skies. The sea in Hawaii sparkles in moonlight and rolls in the breezes of the night. It rocks itself to sleep, as the wind whispers its breathless coo.

Years ago, I threw a bottle with a message into the sea.

 

The sea only reaches Tacoma through the Puget Sound and maybe through some rivers. On the rocky, black-sand shore of the sound, crabs scurry into crevices between stones, carrying with them the detritus of the sea. Tongues of seaweed wash ashore, covered in slime, where they harden slowly under the mild sun. The water of the Puget Sound drops fragments of shells and crabs onto the sand, where they remain half-buried, like the statue of Ozymandias in the desert. But the shore of Tacoma is not a desolate place. The Puget Sound is quiet, and birds rest on the wooden pillars of piers that have known older days. I think that, if I were any good at it, I could skip a rock that would hop infinitely by feeding on the stillness of the sea.

 

I think of these things as I sit in the SUB, alone at a table with five other seats. I’m holding a bottle of soda to my ear and listening to the sea inside of it. At times it sounds like the sea in Hawaii and at others the waves of the Puget Sound, which I suppose, for all their differences, don’t sound that different. Maybe the sea is getting back to me, in response to the message I tossed it years ago. But I don’t know what it’s trying to say, and my friends take their seats, so I lower my bottle and leave the waves for another time.

Against the Current

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Toward the end of my summer vacation, over late-night frozen yogurt, I had a conversation with a friend about how it feels to always be leaving and returning home, for and from school. We were sitting at a table overlooking a marina and watching the water reflect the starlight. Boats bobbed on the current, the water lapping their sides. Two years removed from high school, I feel more than ever a sense of distance from the things that I associate with home—the people and places I knew, and the memories. If home is a place constituted by memories, then home must be ever elusive, a place that necessarily exists in the past, and therefore unreachable. I told my friend, “When I came home this summer, I felt less like I was returning to something real and more like I was returning to a memory.” My friend sympathized. He said, “Even though I live here, the times I feel closest to home are the times when I’m away and remembering it.”

The next day, I drove to my childhood school, which is nestled in a valley between mountains that are a thousand shades of green. When I got there, it was raining, so I parked underneath some trees. I leaned against the window and watched the rain drip from the branches onto the windshield of the car. The rain slid down the window, etching rivulets into the glass and running shadows onto the dashboard. I watched a man drive a lawn mower over the grass, and the grass bent and cracked beneath the blades. Then a bell rang and doors opened and children ran onto the blacktop basketball court with balls and jump ropes and Chinese jacks. And for a moment, I realized that, though I wasn’t, my memories had led me back to a place that I had known in a previous time.

Summer

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I spent most of my summer at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa, where I read, researched, and wrote an essay about Roberto Bolaño’s posthumous novel 2666. My research was funded by the Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences (AHSS) summer research program, which allowed me to sit in a library all-day, doing things that I love to do. For me, this entailed reading a challenging, but rewarding, novel and what a bunch of people much smarter than I had to say about the novel, and writing to seem much smarter than I am about a novel that is much smarter than I. The project was an exercise in independent learning, and I recommend the program to any student with a desire to do something intellectually stimulating over the three-month summer break. (There is a similar research program for students interested in research in mathematics and the natural sciences.) The great thing about the program is that the student has full creative control, choosing everything from the scope of the project to its end product. This is how I was able to write about the book of a Chilean who may never be taught in an undergraduate class. The program also posts completed projects to Sound Ideas, the online repository for Puget Sound students and faculty, and so represents a publication opportunity. I will be presenting a poster on my research at the AHSS symposium in Collins Memorial Library later this semester, alongside the 27 or so other AHSS summer research scholars, whose projects are ambitious, sophisticated, and meritorious.

When I was not writing and reading for my research project, I was writing and reading for fun. To celebrate a friend’s birthday, I put together a collection of poems that my friend and I had written over the past year or so. Using a publishing program called Blurb Bookwright, I printed the collection and had it bound in hardcover. I fancied the book by including professional-quality pictures from an online, attribution-free photography website called Pixabay (which also has nice wallpaper photos). The book featured twenty poems, ten of my friend’s and ten of mine, and a foreword and afterword (which were extraneous, to be sure, but gave the book some credibility) written by two other friends of ours. Needless to say, my friend liked the gift.

I did a modest amount of reading outside of my research. Of the books that I read, my favorites were Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos, a smart, dizzying rumination on the ideas of chaos and order, and Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, which is written with the audacity and power characteristic of Nabokov. I recommend both—and 2666 while I’m at it—though neither is exactly palatable, which, I believe, is the point. I also, at the beginning of the summer, received a signed-copy of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant as part of a pre-order special through Barnes and Noble. I must have spent as much time examining Ishiguro’s signature as I did reading the book. His signature is plain, like his prose, which I think is fitting. It is also tilted, as if behind the cleanliness sits an unreliable narrator, with a tilted smile. Opening the book to Ishiguro’s signature made the reading that followed more personal, and throughout the novel I found myself flipping back to the title page, as if the signature constituted an interpretive key to the book. In the end, I suppose, it served only to mock.

I have talked for long about my summer, when in fact I never strayed from the library. My summer didn’t take me to many new places, as some of my friends’ summers did (Spain, China, New York), but it did challenge me to envision all of these places through books, and it did enable me to learn a few things along the way.

On the Road

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In late May, two weeks after the school year drew down, I drove south from the San Juan Islands to my home in the Bay Area. The drive, fourteen hours with an overnight intermission in Eugene, OR, began a journey on which I planned to drive quite a lot: some ten-thousand miles all told, on a trip that would neatly circumnavigate the country. The while, I would be researching state energy policy. It was a sponsored trip, a university research grant doled out in a single check for the amount of $2,750. An additional stimulus of $500 was to come at the end of the summer, as soon as I had submitted my research and earned the money.

In June and July, I worked my way from California to New York, beetling by a circuitous route across nineteen states and over thousands of miles of backroad highway. My trip plunged, first, into the sunstroked American southwest. Abbey country: Utah and Colorado, where landscapes are scrubbed Desert Solitaire pinks and purples and where, perhaps by some southwestern ordinance, every bookstore seemed made to own at least one signed copy*.

Sunset (not so pink) in Joshua Tree, CA, the last California stop before true SW.

Sunset in Joshua Tree, CA, the last California stop before the true SW.

As a guy who’s only ever lived by a body of coastal water (at the very least by a sound) I was beginning, somewhere in Utah, to go a bit crazy from the dryness. So, like a thirsty migratory bird, I winged my way northeast, stopping first in Texas before traveling up through the soggy South. Misssissippi, Alabama, Georgia, the Carolinas. State by state I absorbed then sweated back out the monsoon humidity of the region, the annual baptism of the South in mid-summer.

I arrived in New York in early August, days unshowered and tanner than ever, my skin crisped a yellow mud color. I had spent most nights** sleeping on the road in the back of my Subaru, a stalwart hatchback of some 200k+ miles whose back seats I had replaced with a platform bed. Four nights on a couch in a friend’s NY apartment, then, felt sadly palatial. The couch was not even very comfortable; it was simply not located in the back of my car.

Wheel

The worn leather of an old wheel.

Four nights were all I had in New York. A nagging internal voice kept reminding me that certain parts of my research were yet-undone. I needed to get home, but I was on the wrong coast.

After some ribbing, I convinced another friend, Robin, to make the drive home with me across the three-thousand-mile width of the U.S.-of-A. We would travel through: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin (briefly), Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and, finally, Washington. In Washington we would stop, stay for a week before driving south to California.

As an aside, I have known Robin nearly my entire life. Our mothers met in a pre-natal group when we were yet unborn. We grew up together, in proximity until he moved to the East Coast in the first grade. We have managed a close friendship since then, upkept by summer visits and an annual backpacking trip.

The smell of gasoline in the morning.

The NY-WA stretch was, is, a long one. According to google maps, the drive alone would require just over forty- three hours of car time. We figured another twenty for sleep/gas/bathroom stops. A ratio of 3-1, driving-to-not-driving. Respectable and manageable. The notion of such speed across such distance had, we thought, a certain sex appeal about it. The appeal of crazy endurance, of comfort foregone for greater speed. Of two rugged dudes racing the very sunset across the spine of the country—of the evening redness in the West—of the lonely flatness of the American interior—of something like that.

Highway Morning

Morning on 90-W: The lonely flatness of the American interior.

And how better to transmit all that steam, we thought, than by an Instagram account?

On the 13th of August, departure day, we make the account. At precisely 1500hr (auspicious because it is the exact time we had planned to leave, which never happens) we pull out from Robin’s driveway. Our first post is a picture of my car with a sentimental caption, and it is yet fresh as we merge onto Interstate 84-W.

Robin takes first shift behind the wheel—first of many, many—and I look out the window, scouring our surroundings for second-post-worthy content. Something exciting, something sexy. I find very little of this: road signs with graphics a touch silly; advertisements one could not imagine would work on anyone; all sorts of funny looking humans, our fellow travelers. But nothing remarkable.

In the aggregate, spoken of in elevated terms—“thousands-of-miles,” “number-of- states”—our journey promised to be grand indeed. Peering around at the highway, no particular thing seemed worthy of it.

Really, though (to be ponderous and altogether less fun), no journey is taken in the aggregate. The aggregate, after all, is an aftereffect; a glittering highlight reel that requires the forgetting of lots of unsexy things—speed limit signs, off-ramps never taken, one-pump stations in anonymous, sad little towns. The aggregate is a retrospective deal. It is only in retrospect that a huge stretch of common driving—a series of McMuffins, refuels, farts—can take on the high romantic quality of the trip, the quest: of the Big, Sexy Journey.

We bought dinner here, sandwiches: two patties, a piece of roast beef, nothing else.

We bought dinner here: two patties, a piece of roast beef, nothing else (no mustard, even!).

The journey (the Big, Sexy Journey (BSJ)) is the story of whatever you want it to be. You can be who you want, on the BSJ, so long as you have a good imagination and are creative with your camera, pen, etc.

Perhaps on the BSJ you are a drifter type. The BSJ is for you the story of a rambler. You are a study in hip, chilled-out nonchalance. Neck bandanna’d, man-bun pinned up sloppy, obscure tee dusty from the wear-’n’-tear of the road, your vibes are alive, on the BSJ, and resonating in all the right ways.

Otherwise on the BSJ you are a wandering sage, a poet taking the temperature of the Heartland. Or else the BSJ is more cynical: You are a sneering anthropologist, gathering about you a sneering ethnography of the towns (cultural voids) along the highways linking East Coast to West-.

Robin and I finish our drive, 3,012 miles in total, in fifty-three hours, arriving in northern Washington a bit more than two days after departing from New York. We do this by stopping exactly nowhere interesting, except twice in South Dakota—once at the Badlands Nat’l Park and again at Mount Rushmore.

The Badlands National Park, South Dakota.

The Badlands National Park, South Dakota.

If we had taken more time for own Big, Sexy Journey, perhaps it would have been sexier than it turned out to be. But our BSJ was flaccid indeed. These inane things, among other inane things, comprised it: fifteen gas stations, 1/3 of Steven King’s The Stand audiobook (a 62-hour-long beast), and a nearly constant patter of dull but diverting conversation.

When we turned off the engine for the last time in The Evergreen State, our Instagram account was populated by exactly one more photo than it’d been when we’d left The Empire. The new addition was a picture of a dusky, alien landscape in the Badlands, SD, the only really remarkable shot taken during the entire trip. Not shown: three-thousand miles of westbound highway 90.

Not shown, at least, until now.

Somewhere in Ohio (or was it Pennsylvania?), I started to shoot footage. Mostly from the passenger-side window. Of passing trees, passing cars, the passing road. A gas station. A rest stop. Another gas station. Another gas station. Another gas station…

Another gas station...

Another gas station.

After working the footage for a couple of days, I made a film of the trip. Having never made a film, this project was a bit out of my wheelhouse, but nevertheless fun to do. The agenda of the film (that is to say the agenda of its creator, of me) included all the usual goals of travel stories: to relay some version of the truth—to make a narrative at once universal and unique—to tell a story.

Yes, this: to tell a story: to string bits and pieces—images, noises, scenes—together into something more than a mere collection of parts.

What departs our travel story from the typical one is the nature of the parts we did collect, those which made the final cut. If other travel stories have a range of parts—some smooth and some sharp, fun because the collection is so eclectic—ours is like a bucket of wing nuts: repetitive, hard to lift, possibly beginning to rust from last week’s rain.

This film focuses on the parts of the drive usually cut from the journey. It lingers for sometimes uncomfortable durations (in mimic of a real drive) on the stretches where absolutely nothing of note happened at all.

This film is very boring; that is basically the point. I hope you enjoy it, though I expect you to not.

*I had left my copy (unsigned) at home and, though I’d already read it, I bought a new one out of a weird feeling of peer pressure, only to not pick it up once over the following months.

**—with the exception of an unmentionable two in Jackson, MI, when the air had been so palpably wet that I caved, rented a motel room and watched Grimm, perhaps the all-time worst show, late into the night.

Field Mouse

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       A few weeks ago I stood atop Stora Klif, the highest point on Heimaey Island with three friends. It was day four of our ten-day Iceland Georney, a biennial field trip to some of the world’s most geologically unique places planned by the UPS geology department. We gazed out over the small island, which was affected by a volcanic eruption in 1973. Heimaey is the only inhabited island in the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago, so when the eruption occurred all the residents had to evacuate while their town was partially destroyed by the lava flow. The lava spewing from the Eldfell Caldera slowly added landmass to the island and threatened to close off the only harbor by advancing into the chilly waters of the North Atlantic. In order to save the island’s fishing industry, the Icelandic people sprayed water on the marginal edge of the flow and cooled the steaming lava (read John McPhee’s The Control of Nature if you want more details). As a result of this great effort, the harbor was left exposed to the open ocean and the fishing could resume. The lava stopped advancing and cooled into solid rock. From our vantage point on Stora Klif, you could clearly see the newest lava flow locked in time until repeated wave action, perhaps for a million years, inevitably erodes it away into sand.

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The view from halfway up Stora Kliff.  The village and harbor can be seen, as well as the 1973 lava flow and the Eldfell volcano above the town. 

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A multicolored volcanic “bomb” from the 1973 eruption. 

         After returning from Iceland, my work as a summer researcher began. I am working with professor Kena Fox-Dobbs and several other researchers from universities scattered across the country. This National Science Foundation project seeks to understand climate and environmental change with different chemical tools and proxies. I traveled to the Meade Basin of southwestern Kansas, where Claude Hibbard first cataloged one of the most fossil-rich sites in North America. Everywhere we collected samples it took only a few minutes of searching to find fossilized bone and teeth falling out of the ancient soil. Fossil research in this area has occurred for seventy years and it was not until recently that research produced more questions than the assemblage of fossils could answer. The current Meade team works with Bob Martin, who knows the area and its fossil sites better than Hibbard himself. Thanks to his hard work and good standing with the local landowners, our team is seeking to answer some of the questions that have arisen in studying changes in the animal communities.   Through studying different snapshots of time in the surrounding units of soil, we hope to collect data that can reflect the environmental conditions that caused these changes. My goal is to collect soil samples with great enough resolution in order to tell a story of plant life on the surface for the last 5 million years. From previous studies within the Great Plains, we know that the modern grassland ecosystem in North America evolved around this time.

       Working with the Meade team in the field was one of the hottest and most spectacular weeks of my life. The whole group is made up of some really great people, who like being outside, talking science, and enjoy one another’s company. While digging in dirt all day in 90° heat without shade, might not seem like a spectacular way to spend one’s summer, it was the people that made the fieldwork such a joy for me. It was interesting to observe how everyone with their own projects and goals in mind could find a way to work efficiently in the field and truly enjoy the work. Being an undergrad surrounded by PhDs, post docs, and graduate professors was intimidating at first. However, I quickly learned that while the PIs were very intelligent they were also down to earth and willing to answer any stupid question I was stupid enough to ask.

        In Meade and on Heimaey we were oblivious to what was occurring in the outside world. We took the time to appreciate the Earth and its many incredible processes. While we stared at a lava flow frozen in time or logged the paleosol horizons in Borcher’s Badlands, we were not wrapped up in the present, with thoughts of our families, world events, and celebrities, but we were people gazing into the past. In Meade, we trenched the soil that camels and rhinos walked upon, that saber-toothed cats peed on. We don’t yet have the ability to travel through time, and probably never will. However, the rocks and soils that make up the mountains, cliffs and ground under our feet give us snapshots into the past. The Meade project is trying to develop tools that will get us pretty darn close to knowing exactly what the environment looked like and ultimately enable others to use these tools in other areas. The more that is known about this time and place, the more it is apparent that we don’t know much at all. Such is science. Through a greater understanding of the world’s past ecosystems, climate, and species, we can better understand how our current landscape came to be, and figure out where the Earth is headed.

P.S.

Many mornings in Kansas were spent wrangling small rodents, cataloging them, and taking hair samples to determine their diets. The Onychomys was a common sight. I developed a new appreciation for these stubborn, aggressive, smelly creatures. This video sheds some light on the simultaneous beauty and brawn of the mighty grasshopper mouse.

Keep an eye out for my next entry I’ve decided to call Lab Rat. Happy Solstice!

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The Borcher’s 4 section in the Meade Basin, Kansas. The Huckleberry Ridge Ash is visible as the white layer about a meter above the shovel. This ash is from an eruption in the Yellowstone Caldera and dated to be 2.1 million years old. 

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A lizard friend in Borcher’s Badlands.