February 2023

Books read:

Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salmon Rushdie
The Flag, the Cross, and the Station Wagon: A Graying American Looks Back at His Suburban Boyhood and Wonders What the Hell Happened by Bill McKibben
Lab Girl by Hope Jahren

Trails walked:

Hollowell Park Loop in Rocky Mountain National Park (Feb 2nd)
Jewel and Mills Lakes in Rocky Mountain National Park (Feb 7th)
St. Vrain State Park (Feb 21st)

Song(s) of the month – Marvin Gaye – National Anthem and What’s Going On

Scientist Spotlight – Kizzmekia Corbett; Viral Immunologist

February Summary:

We welcomed another grandson into the world this month. What a miracle it is, even though it’s been happening for thousands of years. When a child is born, a village rises to the occasion. Our daughter-in-law's parents flew in from the East Coast and our daughter drove up from New Mexico and we all pitched in to watch grandchild number one while grandchild number two was being cared for. Neighbors pitched in by plowing the driveway and providing dinners. There really are mostly good people in the world, despite what we tend to read in the never-ending newsreel. Many people these days are worried about bringing children into this ever-warming, divisive and dangerous world. I read an article last year from Our World in Data that had this first paragraph: “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better. All three statements are true at the same time.” And they go on to show why.

It's understandable, in these days where negative news gets more clicks and more funding, that people see the world as awful. I work as a volunteer for Citizens Climate Lobby where us unpaid volunteers are lobbying members of congress who are also being lobbied by people backed by millions of dollars in special interest money backed by the fossil fuel industry. It sometimes seems like a losing battle. We have science on our side, and lots of smart people, but it’s tough to compete with deep donor pockets and disinformation. But progress is being made, even if it’s not fast enough.

February is the month we set aside to remember and honor Black history, so to tie the previous sentence together with Black History month: In 1853 the abolitionist minister Theodore Parker said: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.” A little over a hundred years later Martin Luther King made that quote his own as he delivered his version of it in a speech at the National Cathedral in Washington DC, just four days before he was assassinated (that moral arc of justice took a hit then). I think it’s generally true that the arc of the moral universe bends towards justice, but sometimes it seems like that arc is too long and too slow. In a perfect world we would all be able to recognize the injustices (to repressed peoples and to our earth) and resolve them. But it’s not a perfect world…there are financial and ideological interests that will continue to fight tooth and nail to make sure their profits and ideologies are not trampled. We need more smart people helping to bend that arc downward a bit more quickly.

This month’s reading took me from “the shot heard ‘round the world” to a couple of very different and very interesting memoirs. My rambling included a couple of snowshoe hikes in Rocky Mountain National Park and a nice walk around a State Park just 6 miles from my house.

Scientist Spotlight: Kizzmekia Corbett; Viral Immunologist

From a New York Times article this month by Debra Kamin: “By the first week of January 2020, the number of infected people in China had climbed to the hundreds, and Dr. Corbett, a viral immunologist, was back at her desk at the National Institutes of Health, where she served as a senior research fellow at the Vaccine Research Center at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. And that’s when the news was confirmed: The mysterious illness was a novel coronavirus, exactly the category of infection that she had been probing for the past five years in a bid to develop a vaccine… in those fraught first few months of 2020, Dr. Corbett helped lead a team of scientists that contributed to one of the most stunning achievements in the history of immunizations: a highly effective, easily manufactured vaccine against Covid-19, delivered and authorized for use in under a year.” Dr Corbett had already published groundbreaking work on coronaviruses, using the science developed by people like Katalin Kariko whom I profiled in my scientist spotlight in the April 2021 blog.

Corbett received her PhD in Microbiology and Immunology from the University of North Carolina in 2014. The list of awards presented to her are long, but just a few are: Key of Life Award from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; the Benjamin Franklin NextGen Award from The Franklin Institute; Clinton Global Citizen Award from the Clinton Foundation; and the Mrs. Rosa Parks Hidden Figure Award from the Rosa and Raymond Parks Institute and the O Museum. How many obstacles do you think she had to overcome in order to accomplish all of these things? As a black woman in science? My guess is: more than we’ll ever know. According the Times article I cited above she came to the attention of the world because of this photo circulated in March of 2020 showing her surrounded by powerful white men waiting on her vaccine:

(Evan Vucci/Associated Press) On March 3, 2020, Dr. Corbett, who was then at the National Institutes of Health, talked to a group including President Donald J. Trump, Dr. Anthony Fauci and, facing Dr. Corbett, Dr. Francis S. Collins, who was then the longtime N.I.H. director, as they toured the laboratory where she worked.

Song(s) of the month: Marvin Gaye – National Anthem and What’s Going On

At this year’s Super Bowl there was a bit of controversy over a song that was sung just prior to the National Anthem. That song was called Lift Every Voice and Sing, and for many years has been considered sort of an unofficial National Anthem for Black people in America. Tony and Emmy award winner Sheryl Lee Ralph sung it beautifully. A few of the knucklehead politicians took to social media to express their displeasure with what they consider the "wokeness" in the NFL. But what I really started thinking about was the Marvin Gaye National Anthem. It was at the NBA All-Star game in 1983 in Los Angeles. I was a big NBA fan at the time and was watching the game on TV. As I watched the anthem unfold, I was spellbound. Nobody had EVER sung the anthem like this. The crowd was swaying and clapping along for the last half minute or so. It was incredible. Of course there was backlash from the knucklehead politicians of that time too. And the 25 year old kid that worked for Jerry Buss of the Lakers and who organized the pregame anthem thought for sure he was getting fired. Luckily for him, Buss loved it. After singing the song, Gaye just walked out of the building; a year later he was dead on the eve of his 45th birthday after being tragically shot by his father while Gaye was trying to stop an argument between his parents. When the video channel VH1 first launched in January of 1985, that anthem was the first music video they played. Here it is:

https://youtu.be/RZ9WdCunvy8

Gaye was known for his hits like I Heard it Through the Grapevine, How Sweet it is to be Loved by You, Let’s Get it On, and Sexual Healing. But his album What’s Going On is his masterpiece. It was a concept album released in 1971 and the songs/stories are told from the perspective of returning Vietnam veterans and seeing the hatred, suffering, and injustice taking place. Many of the lyrics of the title song are, unfortunately, as valid today as they were in 1971:

You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today
Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me
So you can see
Oh, what's going on

This video is from a 50th anniversary visual album created in 2021:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDK7TiEiMOI

Joseph Anton: A Memoir by Salman Rushdie - I'll get to my take on this book in a minute...Last August (2022), Salman Rushdie was attacked by a knife-wielding zealot during a public lecture in New York. He was stabbed 15 times and after weeks in the hospital he has started to recover somewhat. He lost vision in one eye and some feeling in his hands (which makes it difficult to read and to write). Rushdie was 75 years old when this attack occurred. He was 41 years old when Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini declared a fatwa against him on Valentine's Day 1989. A multi-million dollar bounty was placed on his head due to an incredible book he had published the previous year called The Satanic Verses. I wrote about the book in my January 2019 blog.

Initially, when The Satanic Verses came out in 1988, there was some criticism and some anger, but it seemed to be short-lived and was beginning to fade. But everything changed when the Ayatollah declared the fatwa. This was a time, 1989, when Iran had just come out of an unsuccessful 8 year war with Iraq (which began shortly after the new Islamic regime had deposed the shah in 1979). Iran's Islamic regime was in poor favor due to this war. The mullahs saw an opportunity to create a common enemy and reinvigorate the regime, so the fatwa was issued. The year, 1989, was a pivotal moment in world history. The Cold War had ended and the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, a brave man in China defied his country's tanks in Tiananmen square, Nelson Mandela's release was imminent, it seemed that democracy was "winning". But it seems to me that this was also a time when Islamic Terrorism started growing. The decade long Russia-Afghanistan war left a gaping hole in a large country that became a training ground for the future Taliban and Al-Qaida. Attacks became commonplace around the world, with the extremists blaming western governments, authors, and publishers for defaming their religion. Violence on behalf of religion is certainly not owned by Islam. Throughout history many religions have killed in the name of their gods. There's that line in The Rolling Stones' song Sympathy for the Devil:

I watched with glee

While your kings and queens

Fought for ten decades

For the gods they made

I guess I should save the topic of religious extremism for another time. It's too complex. I know that there are many good, religious people who use their faith for the good of mankind. But those that use their religion to advocate death and violence (no matter the reasons) need to be placed back into the Dark Ages.

OK, so the book, Joseph Anton. It's a memoir by Rushdie mainly from the time of the fatwa in 1989 up until the 9/11 attack in 2001. He drifts back before 1989 to describe a bit of his upbringing and his path towards his becoming a literary artist (part of that path included learning about the history of Islam). He also drifts past 2001 as he describes personal and world events related to his life under protection. After the fatwa, British Special Operations put him under protective custody (or "prot"). The book is mainly about this, nearly 12 years of protective custody.

Rushdie was born in India in 1947, the year of Indian Independence from British rule. He was raised in a secular Muslim family with a loving mother and an alcoholic father which spurred him on to England for boarding school (Rugby School) and eventually college (Kings College, Cambridge). Rushdie was already a renowned author when the fatwa was declared. His book Midnight's Children won the Booker Prize in 1981 (in 2008 it won the Best of Booker Award for best of all Booker Award Winners). The Satanic Verses was a finalist for the prize in 1988. Nearly all his works have won some sort of award. He is that gifted. His years in protective custody were obviously difficult. He went through depressions, marital discourse, writers block. But he continued to fight for his right to free speech and he had many supporters in the art and political worlds. He also had many detractors in both worlds. Those detractors would point to painful moments as a result of the fatwa: The Japanese translator of The Satanic Verses was killed; the Italian translator of the book was stabbed; the Norwegian publisher of the book was shot and miraculously survived. The Indian government no longer allowed him to return to his country of birth due to the Muslim-Hindu issues there. Most airlines refused to allow him to fly (he used British military transports for a time). The way protective custody of a non-politician worked in Britain was that the "principal" was required to find his own lodging, which had to accommodate a force of 4-6 agents, at his own expense. How do you search and pay for property when you are under protection? This is where his many friends and supporters helped to provide housing for many years. He also had to come up with an alias in order to sign his name to documents. He thought of two authors he admired: Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekov. Conrad Chekov didn't sound right, so he settled on Joseph Anton.

He was extremely appreciative of the men and women that helped to protect him all those years and had some great stories of their exploits. As he started writing again, the issue of security would rise and he continually fought for more freedom to allow him to publicize his work, even while he was under protection. It was a constant battle between safety and freedom as he had wives, sons, and friends to consider. I say wives, because, well this guy is a great writer, but really bad at relationships. I think he's been married at least 5 times....artists and their personal deficiencies, I think it was Yeats that said "The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life or of the work"....One personal trait Rushdie clung to (with one exception) was the idea of expressive freedom. Under protective custody, he spoke around the world about the ideals of free speech and freedom of expression, even under the direst of circumstances. After an initial mistake he made under duress and depression early in his confinement, where he signed a statement saying that Allah was the only God and that he wouldn't release a paperback edition of The Satanic Verses, he never again waivered. He spent years correcting that mistake, eventually publishing the paperback edition thanks to the bravery of publishers and book sellers around the world.

There were many great stories within the story of his life during this time. His loving relationship with his son, Zafar who was 9 at the time of the fatwa. His friendship with Bono and eventual song-writing credential with the great U2 singer. The love and anger in his romantic relationships. His close friendships with great authors (Don DeLillo, Bill Buford, Saul Bellow); and his feuds with great authors (John le Carre, Roald Dahl). There are meetings with politicians that are fascinating: John Major, Vaclav Haval, Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, Tony Blair. It was really like a bunch of interesting stories within one overarching theme of literary freedom. I suppose he could have made it a bit shorter. I think perhaps 400 pages rather than 600+ would have sufficed....but then he would probably have needed to leave out some interesting stories....and, you know, literary freedom!

There was a great New Yorker article this month about Rushdie which sort of spurred me to read the book. Check it out here if you have the time.

Here are some lines that I enjoyed:

“Oh, don’t worry too much,” the journalist said. “Khomeini sentences the president of the United States to death every Friday afternoon.”

He did not feel his book was especially critical of Islam, but, as he said on American television that morning, a religion whose leaders behaved in this way could probably do with a little criticism.

All their years of desire, love, marriage, parenthood, infidelity (mostly his), divorce, and friendship were in the hug she gave him that night.

the material (in The Satanic Verses) derived from the origin story of Islam was, he thought, essentially admiring of the Prophet of Islam and even respectful toward him. It treated him as he always said he wanted to be treated, as a man (“the Messenger”), not a divine figure (like the Christians’ “Son of God”).

Where they burn books they will in the end burn people too. The line from (Heinrich Heine's) Almansor, prophetically written over a century before the Nazi bonfires, and later engraved in the ground at the Berlin Opernplatz, the site of that old Nazi book burning..the book burned in Almansor was the Qur’an, and the book burners were members of the Inquisition.

On the day the novel was published in America, February 22, 1989 (eight days after the fatwa was issued), there was a full-page advertisement in The New York Times paid for by the Association of American Publishers, the American Booksellers’ Association and the American Library Association. “Free people write books,” it said. “Free people publish books. Free people sell books. Free people buy books. Free people read books. In the spirit of America’s commitment to free expression we inform the public that this book will be available to readers at bookshops and libraries throughout the country.”

He could not... vote, because to vote you needed to provide a home address and that, of course, was impossible. To protect his democratic right of free expression he had to surrender his democratic right to choose his government.

Muslims began to be killed by other Muslims if they expressed non-bloodthirsty opinions.

Irish builders he knew in Birmingham who had been working on the foundations of a big new mosque. When nobody was looking they had dropped a copy of The Satanic Verses into the wet cement. “So that mosque is being built on your book,” Clarissa said (Love the Irish).

The love of the art of literature was a thing impossible to explain to his adversaries, who loved only one book, whose text was immutable and immune to interpretation, being the uncreated word of God.

(Vaclav Havel) gave his first American interview to Lou Reed because the Czech Velvet Revolution had taken its name from the Velvet Underground (thus making the Velvets the only band in history to help create a revolution instead of just singing about it like, for example, the Beatles).

His mother had survived decades of marriage to his angry, disappointed, alcoholic father by developing what she called a “forgettery” instead of a memory.

It was always women who chose, he thought, and men’s role was to thank their lucky stars.

He thanked the people in the room for their solidarity and apologized for materializing and dematerializing in the middle of dinner. “In this free country,” he said, “I am not a free man.” The standing ovation actually brought tears to his eyes, and he was not a man who cried easily.

as his mother used to say, what can’t be cured must be endured.

the madrassas funded by Saudi oil turned out generations of narrow-eyed men with hairy chins and easily clenched fists, Islam moved a long way away from its origins while claiming to be returning to its roots.

On Sunday Bono smuggled him out to a bar in Killiney without telling the Garda and for half an hour he was giddy with the unprotected freedom of it and maybe thanks to the unprotected Guinness too. When they got back to the Hewson house the Garda looked at Bono with mournful accusation but forbore to speak harsh words to their country’s favorite son.

The creative spirit is all too frequently treated as an enemy by those mighty or petty potentates who resent our power to build pictures of the world which quarrel with, or undermine, their own simpler and less openhearted views.

He had been thinking a good deal about what (Anthony) Burgess (author of A Clockwork Orange) called “ultraviolence” (including violence against authors); about the glamour of terrorism, and how it made lost, hopeless young men feel powerful and consequential.

Life was lived forward but was judged in reverse.

the South Tower fell. Birds were screaming in the sky.

His NYT Oped after 9/11: “The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings,” he wrote. “Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women’s rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex.… The fundamentalist believes that we believe in nothing. In his worldview, he has his absolute certainties, while we are sunk in sybaritic indulgences. To prove him wrong, we must first know that he is wrong. We must agree on what matters: kissing in public places, bacon sandwiches, disagreement, cutting-edge fashion, literature, generosity, water, a more equitable distribution of the world’s resources, movies, music, freedom of thought, beauty, love. These will be our weapons. Not by making war, but by the unafraid way we choose to live shall we defeat them. How to defeat terrorism? Don’t be terrorized. Don’t let fear rule your life. Even if you are scared.”

This in the end was who he was, a teller of tales, a creator of shapes, a maker of things that were not.

Hollowell Park Loop in Rocky Mountain National Park – I decided to take the snowshoes out for another walk today. This time I opted to start at Hollowell Park just off of Bear Lake Road. Most of the popular trails in the park are so packed down with thousands of footsteps that snowshoes aren’t even needed, so I picked a much less traveled part of the park, where snowshoes were definitely needed. The area is named for Guy C Hollowell, a cattle rancher who settled in this area in the late 1800s. I opted for a loop that connected the Hollowell Park trail, the Mill Creek Basin trail, a couple of unnamed connector trails, and the Mill Creek-Cub Lake Connector trail. The first half of the loop had an already plowed trail that evidently had been used by cross country skiers, snowshoers, and boot walkers as a way up to Bierstadt Lake. I used the snowshoes anyway because they definitely prevented some post holing. The last half of the loop was virgin snow which nobody has blazed perhaps all winter. It was a fun challenge plowing through that deep, fresh snow while keeping an eye on the map to make sure I wasn’t drifting too far off course. I got some great views of the peaks at the high point where the wind was fairly moderate. I didn’t spot any animals while walking but saw some huge bull elk just outside the park on my drive out. It was a beautiful day in this beautiful national park.

A snowy walk in the woods

Snowshoes necessary

That's the trail!...I think...

Windswept snow

Nice views at the highest point

That is my fully extended hiking pole...

Looks windy up there

I hope those that follow in my path are appreciative of the effort

Nice view near the Bear Road entrance

Big bull elk near the park entrance

The Flag, the Cross and the Station Wagon by Bill McKibben – I’ve been a fan of McKibben’s for a while now. He’s an environmentalist, author, journalist, and activist organizer. He’s started two organizations dedicated to the environment and justice: 350.org and Third Act. 350.org is named for the amount of CO2 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere that is deemed to be safe (we are at 418 ppm now). Third Act organizes people over the age of 60 for action on climate and justice. He began his writing career working for his high school newspaper, was editor for the Harvard Crimson while in college, worked for New Yorker magazine, and has written 20 books about climate and social justice, along with several articles in many different publications. He serves as the Schumann Distinguished Scholar in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College and has won the Gandhi Peace Prize. Foreign Policy named him to its inaugural list of the world’s 100 most important global thinkers.

This book was published in 2022 and is a sort of memoir about his coming of age in the 1970s which seems to have been an inflection point in our country’s cultural history. During the 1970s, wealth and racial disparity were both reducing thanks in part to the social programs of the 1930s and the 1960s, and the activism of the 1960s. Even environmentalism was a bipartisan issue, as Nixon introduced the EPA. So what happened? Since then, wealth inequality has grown nearly exponentially (as of Q4 2021, the top 1% of households in the United States held 32.3% of the country's wealth, while the bottom 50% held 2.6%). This book sets out to try and understand exactly what happened and why. In the book he writes: “I’m curious about what went so suddenly sour with American patriotism, American faith and American prosperity — the flag, the cross and the station wagon. I’m curious if any of that trinity can, or should, be reclaimed in the fight for a fairer future.”

The book is set in three sections. The Flag discusses American history, which is near and dear to him since, as a high school student, he led tours in his hometown of Lexington, Massachusetts where the first shots of the American Revolution were fired. He describes the discoveries he’s made since then about the part of American history that wasn’t in the textbooks. He considers himself a patriot, but he is smart enough to know that our history’s heroes were flawed, and much of the racial and social injustice of today can be traced back to our history. In the second section he discusses religion in America and how it’s changed from the mainline protestant majority of the 1950s and 60s to the now more evangelical and political religions of today and their hypocrisy in terms of what Jesus strove for. In the last section, The Station Wagon, he talks about the rise of suburbia and its role in racial and social inequity. One example he gives is of his hometown of Lexington, a generally very liberal town but whose residents have voted down policies that would introduce lower cost housing into their neighborhoods (not in my backyard).

Much of the problem is what I’ve written about several times in the past. We are too consumed as individuals to care enough for the community at large. He traces some of the reasons for this to the politics and business interests of the 1980s and beyond. It’s a very personal history which gives plausible reasons for how we’ve ended up where we are now as a country (hopelessly divided politically, with dwindling faith, and an individualistic bent to our lives). But he’s an optimistic guy and he continues to have faith that we will one day act as those farmers in Lexington did in the 1700s and fight for the good of our community. It’s what he’s trying to do with the organizations he’s created. Here are some lines from the book:

my life, and the life of other people like me, was built in very real part on the suffering of others. That’s not wokeness, and that’s not “critical race theory.” That’s history.

the numbers are almost unbelievably stark: in 2014, for every dollar in a white household, a Black household had less than seven cents…it’s not wokeness. It’s math. Black Americans have seven cents on the white dollar.

That this is clearly unfair does not mean that my parents didn’t work hard their whole lives—they did. It doesn’t mean my brother and I haven’t worked hard—we have, and so have our kids. But it does mean that we got an unearned boost the whole time: the economic wind was at our backs, the gravity of money was tugging in our direction. And others, because of the color of their skin, faced an unrelenting headwind.

(Ta-Nehisi) Coates wrote of this at the end of his classic book Between the World and Me that America’s racism runs so deep that only an environmental apocalypse could dent our civilization enough to root it out. He may be right. And of course we may find out.

... the fifty richest Americans own more wealth than the bottom half of the population, 165 million people. (Between them Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of the country.) The average worker takes home less money in real terms than in the year I got out of high school (1978).

on June 20, 1979, (Jimmy Carter) invited dignitaries and reporters onto the roof of the White House to watch the installation of thirty solar hot-water heating panels. “A generation from now,” he said, “this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people.” In truth, it took much less than a generation to deliver the verdict: literal museum piece. Shortly after taking office, Reagan cut the renewable energy research budget by 85 percent and let the tax credits for solar panels expire; he did away with assistance for weatherizing homes and ended energy efficiency requirements for appliances…in 1986 the Reagan administration took the panels down from the White House roof and stored them away in a Virginia warehouse.

The Wall Street Journal calculated in 2021 that the median net worth for Black households with college grads had fallen to $8,200, compared with $114,000 for their white counterparts.

the Country Squire station wagon turned into the Denali, the Yukon, the Tahoe, all the mammoth machines named for the things that their emissions were melting or burning.

Reagan’s big punchline, in hundreds of speeches over dozens of years, never varied: “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” That spell may finally be breaking now: the scariest words in the English language, it turns out, are “we’ve run short of ventilators.” Or “the hillside behind your house is on fire.” Or “I can’t breathe.” And they point to crises that can be solved only when we act together.

Jewel and Mills Lakes in Rocky Mountain National Park – One of the goals I’ve been working towards is to try and see some of the same beautiful trails during different times of the year. I hadn’t yet been to Mills and Jewel Lakes in the wintertime, so that’s what I decided to do on this day. Last September I hiked past both these lakes all the way to Black Lake and then off trail to Blue Lake. That hike would be nearly impossible in winter (by me anyway) due to lack of sunlight and trudging through deep snow. So I settled on about half the distance. The Glacier Gorge parking lot had only two empty spaces left on this perfect winter morning. I say perfect because the sun was shining, and the wind wasn’t blowing. That’s almost unheard of up here in the winter. I guess others had the same idea. The first 2.5 miles up to Mills Lake was hard packed snow from the many visitors this place gets, even in winter. So I strapped my snowshoes onto my daypack and put microspikes on my boots. It’s a nice, steady uphill walk of 800 feet in those first 2.5 miles with stunning views as you approach Mills Lake. There were a few people milling about Mills Lake as I made my way across the thick ice to the other side. Once there I strapped on my snowshoes for the slog up to Jewel Lake and beyond. Jewel Lake is only a hundred yards past Mills, but hardly anyone goes there it seems. The two times I’ve been here (once in September and now) I was the only one at Jewel Lake and it’s just as stunning as Mills. I decided to keep walking until it was time to turn around to beat the sunset and I made it another three quarters of a mile though pretty snow-covered forests and meadows. Someone had tried this earlier without snowshoes and I saw the holes in the snow where they were falling to their hips, while I was gliding far above those postholes in my snowshoes. This is where I have now become a believer in snowshoes. The difference was pretty obvious; I was having fun, while they were likely miserable, and risking injury.

I didn’t spot any interesting animals today (they are harder to find in winter), but saw so many tracks. I really want to spot a snowshoe hare now that I’ve seen their huge and interesting tracks everywhere up here. It was a beautiful winter day. Everyone I stopped to talk with commented on the lack of wind. This lack of wind, plus the snow-covered trails made for a very peaceful and enjoyable walk. What a beautiful world we live in. I wish everyone could have this kind of experience in their lives to offset the daily news. I’m very lucky.

Snow, ice, and water

Aspens dancing in the snow

Red rocks, white snow, green trees, blue sky

What Alberta Falls looks like in winter..underwhelming

Not a good sign for horses....

Nice views as you rise in elevation

The outlet of Mills Lake

Snow covered Jewel Lake

Nearly buried sign

A good case for snowshoes vs no-showshoes

Sun trying to penetrate the ice of Mills Lake

I'll cross that snow bridge when I get there

Snowshoe hare prints

Back at the trailhead

Lab Girl by Hope Jahren – Well this book was like no other I’ve read before. A sort of memoir by a woman who is a plant scientist. She not only provides fascinating science about plants, but also delves into her deepest personal stories, from her cold (literally and figuratively) upbringing in Minnesota to her bipolar disorder, to her fears about raising children, to the lack of funding for science in this country…and of course the sexism she’s encountered like most female scientists. Anyone who argues that scientists are only in it for the money should give this a read (but I suppose people who say that probably don’t read). One of the things that struck me was how difficult it is for a post-doc scientist to start a research lab. It’s a catch-22 situation where funding isn’t available for new scientists because they have no “resume” of research yet. Another fact that got my attention was the incredible amount of hours a good scientist puts into their work.

She and her research partner, Bill, discovered each other while Hope was a graduate teaching assistant taking a group out on a field trip. She noticed this guy far from the other students, digging more holes in the ground and collecting more samples than anyone else (plus he brought along his own digging tool). That started a lifelong professional relationship that was the heart of the book. Hope and Bill are the kind of scientists that break new ground and discover new things and provide data for generations to come. Their relationship was funny and poignant at the same time. Hope eventually married a mathematician, but she had to make it clear that Bill was part of the bargain (like a brother or lifelong friend would be). There were lots of interesting and funny stories throughout the book but probably the parts that will stay with me longest were the science stories about plants. So many fascinating facts, so little time!

Here are some lines:

The mass ratio of plants to animals in the ocean is close to four, while the ratio on land is closer to a thousand.

In the last ten years, we’ve cut down more than fifty billion trees. One-third of the Earth’s land used to be covered in forest. Every ten years, we cut down about 1 percent of this total forest, never to be regrown.

The vast emotional distances between the individual members of a Scandinavian family are forged early and reinforced daily… It must be a survival skill left over from the old Viking days, when long silences were required to prevent unnecessary homicides during the long, dark winters when quarters were close and supplies were dwindling.

The very attributes that rendered me a nuisance to all of my previous teachers—my inability to let things go coupled with my tendency to overdo everything—were exactly what my science professors liked to see.

science for war will always pay better than science for knowledge.

Most seeds wait for at least a year before starting to grow; a cherry seed can wait for a hundred years with no problem.

A coconut is a seed that’s as big as your head. It can float from the coast of Africa across the entire Atlantic Ocean and then take root and grow on a Caribbean island. In contrast, orchid seeds are tiny: one million of them put together add up to the weight of a single paper clip.

If a root finds what it needs, it bulks into a taproot—an anchor that can swell and split bedrock, and move gallons of water daily for years, much more efficiently than any mechanical pump yet invented by man.

On the day that I became a scientist, I stood in a laboratory and watched the sun come up.

I looked forward to my analyses with the same happy anticipation one brings to a baseball game: anything might happen, but it will probably take a long time.

I had never liked lecture courses anyway—everything important that I had learned had come to me from working with my hands.

Every toadstool, from the deliciously edible to the deathly poisonous, is merely a sex organ that is attached to something more whole, complex, and hidden. Underneath every mushroom is a web of stringy hyphae that may extend for kilometers, wrapping around countless clumps of soil and holding the landscape together.

Looking up, you notice that the leaves at the top of any tree are smaller, on average, than the leaves at the bottom. This allows sunlight to be caught near the base whenever the wind blows and parts the upper branches. Look again and you’ll notice that leaves low in the canopy are of a darker green; they contain more of the pigment that helps each leaf absorb sunshine, allowing them to harvest the weaker rays that penetrate shade.

America may say that it values science, but it sure as hell doesn’t want to pay for it. Within environmental science in particular, we see the crippling effects that come from having been resource-hobbled for decades: degrading farmland, species extinction, progressive deforestation…The list goes on and on.

Ask a science professor what she worries about. It won’t take long. She’ll look you in the eye and say one word: “Money.”

On her bipolar disorder finally being diagnosed: And by luck, by stupid luck, or time or chance or Providence or Jesus or who cares, your appointment happens to be at the best hospital in the world and a doctor looks at you hard and he says, “You don’t have to live this way.” And he asks questions until you’ve told him everything and he’s not horrified or disgusted or even surprised; he says people have this and they manage it. He asks you how you feel about medicine and you tell him that you aren’t afraid of anything made in a laboratory.

Love and learning are similar in that they can never be wasted.

Three billion years of evolution have produced only one life form that can reverse this process and make our planet significantly less green.

On the continent of Africa, a Pennsylvania-sized area of forest is converted to city every five years.

A chilly autumn brings on the same hardening as a balmy one, because the trees do not take their cue from the changing temperature. It is the gradual shortening of the days, sensed as a steady decrease in light during each twenty-four-hour cycle, that triggers hardening. Unlike the overall character of winter, which may be mild one year and punishing the next, the pattern of how light changes through the autumn is exactly the same every year.

A manic-depressive pregnant woman cannot take Depakote or Tegretol or Seroquel or lithium or Risperdal or any of the other things that she’s been taking on a daily basis for years in order to keep herself from hearing voices and banging her head against the wall. Once her pregnancy is confirmed she must cease all medications quickly (another known trigger)… The statistics are pretty simple: a bipolar woman is seven times as likely to experience a major episode while pregnant, compared with before or after. Leaving her to ride it out without medication for the first two trimesters is the cruel reality upon which doctors insist… I go to the hospital in earnest and stay for weeks at a time, strapped down when nothing else works, and they put me through countless rounds of electroconvulsive therapy, which make me forget most of 2002.

“You just had a completely healthy nine-pound baby,” says a young nurse with a smile. I smile back at her. “I must be stronger than I look.” “All women are,” my doctor adds while scrutinizing the womaniest part of me, improvising a pattern upon which to seam the torn pieces and hem the jagged edges.

If we think of all the water on Earth as an Olympic-sized swimming pool, the amount that’s available to plants within the soil would fill less than one soda bottle.

Every kiss that I give my child heals one that I had ached for but was not given—

I have learned that raising a child is essentially one long, slow agony of letting go.

A scientist is supposed to feel overwhelmed at the beginning of her career, not the end. But the more I know, the more my legs buckle underneath me with the weight of all this information.

I’m good at science because I’m not good at listening. I have been told that I am intelligent, and I have been told that I am simple-minded. I have been told that I am trying to do too much, and I have been told that what I have done amounts to very little. I have been told that I can’t do what I want to do because I am a woman, and I have been told that I have only been allowed to do what I have done because I am a woman. I have been told that I can have eternal life, and I have been told that I will burn myself out into an early death. I have been admonished for being too feminine and I have been distrusted for being too masculine. I have been warned that I am far too sensitive and I have been accused of being heartlessly callous. But I was told all of these things by people who can’t understand the present or see the future any better than I can.

St. Vrain State Park - Prior to this year, it would have cost $80 for an annual state park pass or $10 for a day pass. But a new program just implemented allows residents to purchase an annual pass for only $29 as part of your vehicle registration fee. I snapped that up and headed over to this nice state park which is only 6 miles from my home. It was a nice winter day with highs in the 50s and very little wind as I wound my way around the park's ten ponds. I saw a few people ice fishing which seemed a bit dicey on a sunny 50 degree day, and just when I thought that, I saw one guy fall through the ice close to shore. He was fine, but it made me understand why there were so many rescue ropes scattered around the ponds. I talked to him afterwards and he was happy because he caught lots of rainbow trout!

The park is home to lots of varied wildlife, even in winter and I knew it was gonna be a good day when, 20 seconds into my hike a giant golden eagle swooped just in front of me. Very cool. I also saw a bald eagle, blue heron, arctic terns (or were they gulls?), lots of deer and geese of course. There were a few folks camping here and braving the winter, mostly in their heated RVs, but I'd say that the campgrounds were only 5-10% full which I imagine is a far cry from summertime up here. The only negative is the proximity to I-25. As I walked around Pelican Pond in the northeast part of the park I could probably throw a rock onto the interstate (I didn't though). The sound of the traffic faded when I was walking around Blue Heron Reservoir in the southwest portion of the park. This reservoir, interestingly, was created 10 years ahead of schedule due to the 2013 flood. In a matter of hours, the flood filled the space where the reservoir was planned to be.