In minutes the winding pockmarks became new macadam, but our progress remained slow until we passed the yellow-flagged, plant-eating crew manning machines that chewed shoulder grass, weeds, and three-inch thick branches like Skoal. For the next several miles the expansive views and expensive houses explained why the road was the best we had yet found on the island.

At a junction not shown on our see-visit-buy map, the Scenic Route, which was indicated to be dirt throughout, finally found its nature and became dirt. Rising, twisting, and no longer mowed, it collapsed to a narrow, rutted lane, and began climbing steeply. Never ones to do the common touristic quadrille, we laughed at the mountain and commented on the beautiful flora, the soft breeze, and the thrill of exploration.

(Artist's conception...some objects have been enlarged to improve narrative clarity)

A furlong more, and my love for the rut-rock road became an oil pan anxiety. I stopped, got out, and hiked uphill, looking for an expanded waist where I might perform a three-, four-, or eight-point turn and live to drive another road. I measured each possible location with my eyes, discarding all that seemed likely to drop a wheel down and hang up the undercarriage. Finally, five car lengths into litho-purgatory, I resolved to make my play.

My confidence was not buoyed when, upon my resitting the driver’s seat, my wife, fearing sinkholes, surprising abysses, or my unexpected desire to breach the cliff edge, announced that she would watch from land. I laughed with a Legionnaire’s sangfroid, mounted my camel, and proceeded alone across dip and prominence, listening with three ears for the rasp of destruction below.

Credit fair driving and fine surveying. I made the forth-and-back without incident and returned to St. Croix’s pleasant roads accompanied by my wife and her many compliments.

After a delicious and authentic Frederiksted lunch of salt fish with dumpling and stewed goat served by the West End Grill’s no-nonsense wait staff, we spent the rest of the day at the St. George Botanical Gardens, a thoroughly enjoyable afternoon.

Unique among the many such collections we have visited, the St. George is on the grounds of an 18th century Danish sugar cane plantation, with the plants growing out of the ruins.

Where other facilities might have lawyers protecting visitors from the risk of slanted, uneven steps, St. George requires your activity and connection to them. “Beautiful,” we said repeatedly, always conscious of emotional cross–currents engendered by robust, spectacular, and rare plant life lifting out of tumbled rock walls erected by African slaves.

(More from the St. George Botanical Gardens to follow soon.)

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

The largest earthquake ever recorded was the 9.5 magnitude 1960 Valdivia earthquake, also in Chile.

Just to put the Great Chilean Earthquake (an alternate name for the Valdivia quake) in its perspective, scientists estimate that the Yucatán Peninsula bolide (meteor) impact that created the Chicxulub crater 65 million years ago and led to mass extinction of the dinosaurs and other species had the energy of almost 600 Valdivia earthquakes.

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Commonly—and erroneously.

The internet offers near-instant access to information. It is ironic that in some cases this easy of access decreases accuracy.

Wikipedia explains the term clearly and correctly:

A blue moon is a full moon that is not timed to the regular monthly pattern. Most years have twelve full moons which occur approximately monthly, but in addition to those twelve full lunar cycles, each solar calendar year contains an excess of roughly eleven days compared to the lunar year. The extra days accumulate, so that every two or three years (7 times in the 19-year Metonic cycle), there is an extra full moon. The extra moon is called a “blue moon.” Different definitions place the “extra” moon at different times.

• In calculating the dates for Lent and Easter, the Clergy identify the Lent Moon. It is thought that historically when the moon’s timing was too early, they named an earlier moon as a “betrayer moon” (belewe moon), thus the Lent moon came at its expected time.

• Folklore gave each moon a name according to its time of year. A moon which came too early had no folk name – and was called a blue moon – bringing the correct seasonal timings for future moons.

• The Farmers’ Almanac defined blue moon as an extra full moon that occurred in a season; one season was normally three full moons. If a season had four full moons, then the third full moon was named a blue moon.

But in its March 1946 issue, Sky & Telescope magazine unintentionally set the record wrong, misinterpreting previous definitions and stating that a blue moon was the term given to the second full moon in a single calendar month. The new-and-wrong definition caught on, and even thought the magazine eventually corrected its error (in its May 1999 issue and again in a good-hearted, self-effacing press release two days ago), over that half-century, the new, easier-to explain definition had almost completely supplanted the old.

That’s the way of language; it changes.

It’s me replaces It’s I.

I’m  like… replaces I said…

Blue moon gets a new definition.

So on New Year’s Eve, this wrong new definition shone around the world.

Singapore’s Straits Times got it right: “The original meaning of ‘blue moon’ was the third full moon in a season with four instead of the usual three.”

The Jerusalem Post wrote: “But a real blue moon – not a reference to the moon’s tint but designating its appearance a second time in a single calendar month – was visible Thursday night where there were no clouds – along with a partial lunar eclipse that could be sighted throughout the Middle East.”

The Times of India noted correctly, “It is basically a calendar event and has no astronomical importance as such.”

Some of this New Year’s references to blue moon were benign, even charming:

A segment on Omaha’s WOWT-TV included, “It happens once roughly every two and a half years. Thirteen moons in a twelve month period—when two fall in the same calendar month, it’s called a blue moon. And the saying “once in a blue moon” refers to a rarity—something that doesn’t happen very often….And just before midnight a wedding.”

Some were educative.

Richard Brill, writing in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, noted correctly that “A full moon on New Year’s Eve is rare, but when it happens it is always a ‘blue moon.’”

Others were simply inaccurate, misleading, or both.

The Christian Science Monitor mis-cited the initial Sky & Telescope article: “But in 1943 [sic], Sky and Telescope Magazine erroneously wrote that the second full moon in any calendar month was called a blue moon. The label stuck and is still used today.”

China View got the definition entirely wrong. In a caption to this photo, it wrote: “The sunset is reflected on the wing of a commercial airliner as the full moon rises over clouds in the horizon over Athens December 31, 2009. For only the second time in nearly two decades [sic], Earth is illuminated by a “Blue Moon,” the name given to the second full moon appearing in a single month.”

NASA, as should be expected, referenced the Sky & Telescope error-and-restatement correctly, but blundered when it stepped down from its ethereal bailiwick into song lyrics: “In music, [blue moon is] often a symbol of melancholy. According to one Elvis tune, it means “without a love of my own.” On the bright side, he croons in another song, a simple kiss can turn a Blue Moon pure gold.”

A quick search will show that those two musical interpretations occur in the same immensely popular Rodgers & Hart song (Blue Moon), recorded variously by Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and scores of others, but made most popular by the Marcels’ in their #1 do-wop version (1961).

Do the research. More frequently than once in a blue moon, the internet will be wrong.

But if the tune is good…sing along!

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Photo credits: Blue moon---canyonhiker (who admits to PhotoShopping it blue); Jetliner---Xinhua/Reuters Photo

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Up here in the country, the world gets a used-up look a day or two after a February snowfall. Dust drifts over the fields from the dry roads, the corn stubble begins to poke through, and the plows have left a margin of gritty slush and knocked down a mailbox or two. All the more reason to look for those moments just after a snowfall, when the snow is not yet public, when it has only been tracked by an animal or two out on the ice and in the fields.

I never see a truly straight track. There is always a bend in it, as if curiosity was a kind of lateral gravity, always pulling the creature off course. But then I remember that “off course” is a human conceit. Judging by the tracks I see, there is no going so hard that one has to go straight. I can’t begin to guess what was gathered in the meander of a “foxprint” along the river ice. The fox knows, and that’s enough.

I don’t know why the sight of fresh tracks in the snow elates me. Perhaps it’s just the reminder that, minus the human footprint, this is still a world of animal trails. Over the fields, the hawks are laboring in an absence of updrafts. Is that how the year divides for them? A season of thermals rising over the dark earth, and a season when the snow seems to capture the wind and hold it down? Out on the lake-ice, the anglers are sitting on upturned buckets, the bold ones having snowmobiled to their holes. And yet they tested the ice with no more sophistication than the deer I saw walking across Piney Creek in Wyoming a week ago. You ease out onto the surface and see what gives.

I’ve grown used to the sullen light at last, and I find myself hoping for another storm, another chapter in a private winter. But the south-facing slopes are starting to melt quickly, and the skunks are almost certainly starting to think about breeding. Soon the male skunks will be out on the roads, and February will have come in earnest.

John Updike 1932-2009

chullo hat

[Updike] was, above all, a maker of sentences, one of the very best. You can read him for his books, but it’s better to read him for his sentences, any one of which — anywhere — can rise up to startle you with its wry perfection.

…which well describes Klinkenborg’s own writing.

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

It is an engaging video, and comments on other websites from eyewitnesses (most often reporting their visits to Thailand) to such “artwork creation” give good evidence that this is not a fraud. The elephant is actually holding the brush to the paper and moving it with precision.

A more important question is whether the elephant is recreating an image from its memory or is simply repeating a series of brush strokes that it has learned through training. If the former, it is fair to call this painting art—and a clear example of creativity and a self-reflective consciousness. If the latter, it is a circus trick—but a good one!

In The Descent of Man, Darwin wrote, “The mental faculties of man and the lower animals do not differ in kind, although immensely in degree.” On the surface, Darwin’s statement seems to include a belief in gradients, a gradual and continuous phylogenic climb. This would imply that species only slightly lower than humans on the evolutionary ladder ought to have at least a rudimentary creativity, and if properly equipped (we have opposable thumbs, remember), could demonstrate it. It may be true. Some primates, using signs because of vocalizing limitations, have been able to show significant language skills. This is frightening to some. The existence of self-reflective consciousness in animals is anti-Cartesian (Descartes thought only humans had souls and, therefore, consciousness), and anti-Creationist.

But what seems continuous may actually be a series of discontinuous steps, consciousness-creating quanta, each occasioned by genetic mutations, which by their GATC substitutions are inherently incremental and discrete. The creative, self-reflective consciousness that streams through human culture may not be unique because we are special. Humans may have become special because we are discontinuously unique.

In The Missing Link in Cognition, a collection of essays edited by Herbert Terrace and Janet Metcalfe, self-reflective consciousness is defined as “the ability to doubt what one knows, to deny or affirm one’s beliefs, to judge one’s own memories and percepts, to comment on one’s dreams, to recollect and reflect upon one’s own past…” There are many studies of self-reflective consciousness in animals: elephants seem to have some understanding of death; they often attend the bones of relatives. Chimps appear to grieve when family members die. Dolphins recognize mirror reflections as images of themselves.

Some chimps paint abstractly, but what about this wondrous pachyderm, capable of representational art that is nearly as recognizable as the cave paintings at Lascaux? Is she aesthetically aware as she paints the elephant holding a flower? Researchers Gisela Kaplan and Lesley J. Rogers, noting that sales of elephant-painted canvases are being used to raise money for zoos and conservation ask:

“Is this really art, or are the paintings more or less accidentally pleasing to us but not to the animal itself?… The first step in deciding whether an animal might have produced a painting as art is to find out exactly what that animal can see. If an animal seems to use color aesthetically but either lacks color vision entirely or is able to perceive only some colors, we would have to conclude that any aesthetic use of color is accidental, however pleasing it may appear to us.”

© Cornell University Computer Graphics Program

It is not clear in this video what role the handler is playing. Certainly he is choosing the colors and handing the elephant the brush. The real story, I suspect, is that like a dog trained to climb steps, jump through hoops, and do back flips in a set sequence, this elephant creates his “art” after intensive training in copying a painting originally done by a human—many trials repeated and repeated with rewards and punishments until the animal has mastered the trick. As proof of this faithful, rote memory, there is another video online of the same elephant painting a nearly identical picture. As Horton says, “I meant what I said, and I said what I meant. An elephant’s faithful one hundred percent.” Or, perhaps there is something to the old saw, “An elephant never forgets.”

Finally, and sadly, young elephants in Thailand are separated from their mothers and subjected to a brutal domesticating training regime called phaajaan (”breaking the love between”). Click the link if you have stomach or curiosity. Phaajaan is, they claim, necessary to “break” the animal…or to make it paint.

* * * * *

Three days after I posted this, CNN picked up the story, but their piece was simply a couple of minutes of “gee-whiz.” No research. No attempt to figure out what is actually happening.

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

* * * * *

It is a quiet, very hot, summer night in the San Fernando Valley. I am doing the brotherly thing, house-sitting for my sibling, who is abroad with his family. Suddenly there is a dog commotion in the back yard. I step out and am staggered by the eau de stinkola of a skunk on defense. Flashlight in hand, I venture cautiously into the wilder corners of my brother’s large back yard.

Sarah, his springer spaniel (who should be known by her Native American name, Yaps-at-Squirrels), has cornered a puny black-and-white up against the back fence and is barking furiously, nipping and leaping as stench-grenades fly. Numerous direct hits, yet the dog seems immune to the reeking onslaught. Little Mr. P.U., however, his ammo drying up, is becoming desperate. He feints right, darts left with teeth bared, and Sarah retreats a step. Seeing a chance, the striper jukes for a getaway, but Sarah performs a snap-and-grab. There is one last squirt as dog jaws clamp, followed by spectacularly rapid dogs-head side-to-siding. I hear an audible snackle of neck bones, and the benighted game is over.

Canines 1, Muskmongers 0.

Sarah then makes certain the war is over, pushing and prodding the cadaver for several minutes, making certain in this process to soak up whatever outrageous juices are still available. I, meanwhile, stand dumbly watching, fingers pinching nostrils, incapable of action in the face of chemical warfare.

At last satisfied with her victory, Sarah brings the trophy to me, dropping it at my feet. Better said, where my feet had been prior to my bolting for the house. Nonetheless, the bouquet wafts chafingly through my windows, accenting my hot stuffy room with a sharp acridity.

Eventually I return to triple-bag the dead beast, which, chambers empty, smells less bad than the proudly alive and full-of-it spaniel. I hook the bag carefully outside my car window and close the door, then drive two blocks away to an unattended trash can. The trophy will percolate through Thursday’s predicted swelter awaiting Friday morning’s trashman. I have taken account of prevailing winds.

When I return, the odiferous dog is barking piteously. With the glories of war faded from her walnut brain, she seeks an Odyssean return from battle to the bosomy comforts of hearth and family. She wants love. I barricade myself in the house.

My brother will return from two weeks abroad tomorrow. I will buy several gallons of tomato juice in anticipation. But that is all.

Am I my brother’s dog’s cleaner?

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

I suspect, looking back, that such gardening ease actually produced a glory of flowering plants, but there are only two in my childhood memory: zinnias and nasturiums. When I was eight, I planted zinnias in the east-facing side yard alongside the house. I remember them as pink and very large. The nasturtiums, brilliantly orange and yellow, grew wild, sheltered under overgrown anise, in the dirt between the Southern Pacific right-of-way and the old dairy building that became a discarded Coca-Cola bottling plant that became a synagogue. There was, I think, no flower on the anise, but the feel of its stems stays with me. Thick, fibrous, taller than a boy’s shoulder. Dusty, interconnected by old spider webs. High on the plant were the thin, tender shoots that could be wiped on a shirt and chewed with temperance for the intense taste of licorice. And there was the oily smell of seeds crushed against each other in two palms rubbed hard.

Nasturtiums were weeds beside those tracks, spots of color that held a secret reward passed by boys’ whispers. Frequenters of today’s trendish restaurants where designer salads vie for you’ve-never-seen-this-leaf-before palates, know that nasturtium flowers are edible, as well as brightly colored and peppery, but boys in my neighborhood knew more: the thin, straw-like funnel that hung below the flower held a sweet nectar that could be sucked out by plucking the bloom and biting off the bottom. One out of every four, however, held a live bug, usually an ant, and from that census came a pause before self-gratification and eventually, attention to the trail ahead.

In flowers, there came an understanding that life is full of bugs.

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.