I'm not a firefighter, but boy am I used to fire drills. Fire drills, around here, are those times when life gets interrupted by alarums and excursions and everyone involved runs around waving their arms, making a lot of noise and not accomplishing much of anything. They seem to come in waves, like tsunamis, and last Saturday was a beach day here.
The geek, as usual, was deeply involved in tweaking some computers, so he had them all laid out on the floor of his computer room. This is about the size of a refrigerator box and as dark as a cave because its only window looks out onto the mudroom. It's crammed with file cabinets, cardboard boxes and piles of CDs which sprout from the floor like mushrooms. Wires lie in coils and loops, just waiting to trip the unwary, and the only light comes from the four computer monitors that are on constantly. If blind cave crickets built computers, this is where they'd build them.
Of course, this isn't all the geek was up to this beautiful summer weekend. Nope. There was also lawn mowing to do (about ten acres), the pool to be drained enough so that we could add clean water to it and sundry other little chores that summer brings on. So he alternated between sitting cross-legged on the floor of his cave, racing madly around the fields on the lawn mower and dashing back and forth to the pool, which was draining. Basically, he was a blur punctuated by what looked like a geek doing yoga.
Meanwhile, my brother and my son and I were deeply involved in making my son's business cards in MY computer room, which is in the basement, but has two windows looking east and south, so it's sunny, pleasant and roomy. (The geek hates it because there's always a glare on the computer screen, he says.) We had just gotten to the part where we were printing out the cards when there was a horrible roar of pain from the next room, where Geekdaddy was attaching the pool hose to the water pump.
We all raced in to find him rolling on the floor, clutching his right knee and swearing in Fortran. Finally, he lay still, his legs under the oil tank and his head against an old pool ladder. He could hardly talk because he was on the verge of passing out, but we managed to discover that he'd twisted his knee. Not recently, though. No, Geekdaddy being Geekdaddy, he'd twisted it and fallen a few minutes before that, thought nothing of it, walked over to the basement, bent down to attach the hose and felt a horrible rending tear in his knee.
We quickly realized that we couldn't get him onto his feet or move him at all, so we called 911. We live in a very rural area, so the town rescue team appeared, gently extricated him from under the oil tank and stabilized him and put a splint on his leg while we waited for the "real" ambulance. Since the EMTs were our neighbors, the Geek chatted - between groans - about town politics and the deplorable condition of the roads until two men showed up at the door to the basement with a stretcher.
The door is very narrow and leads to the inground pool area, with hardly enough room for the geek to fit between the pool and the fence when he has his favorite "tire tube" floatie on, so we were apprehensive, as they maneuvered him out on the stretcher.
What if he fell into the pool? Could he swim with his knee like that? Would the stretcher float? Would one of the EMTs fall in and sue us or drown? Why couldn't he have fallen right away, while he was out in the yard, where they could have just whisked him onto the stretcher, instead of waiting until he was down in the basement, half underneath an oil tank, with a pool and a chain-link fence in the way? Why does he always have to do things the hard way?
Well, while we held our collective breath, they did it. No one fell into the pool, off the stretcher or into the hollyhocks. I grabbed my keys, kissed the kids goodbye and drove to the hospital behind the ambulance. When I got there, he was in the hallway, but was soon wheeled to x-ray, and then into an exam room. It was a long wait for the doctor, but luckily for us, the hospital provided entertainment when Vomiting Woman entered the room to the left of us, and Coughing Man arrived at the room to our right. It's impossible to be bored while listening to two complete strangers alternately dry-heaving and moaning and coughing lung particles up. Bilious, yes. Bored, no.
Finally, the doctor came in and assured us that there was nothing broken, just a bad sprain and Geekdaddy would have to keep off that leg for a while. No lawn mowing, pool filling or sitting on floors tweaking computers. They wrapped it with an ace bandage, gave him crutches and a prescription for a few pain pills and sent us home.
By the time we arrived, the kids had already eaten dinner, and we were all knackered. We got the geek settled into his recliner, resisted his pleas for a CPU to tweak, and before the local news was over, my daughter was yawning. After she had gone to bed, my son went up to his room and turned his light off before ten. The geek hobbled into the bedroom shortly after that, and I settled down to read "Good Grief" an excellent book by Lolly Winston. I was enthralled and starting to relax finally with a cup of tea after all of the Sturm und Drang of the day, when an unearthly howling arose, seemingly on three sides of the house at once.
It startled me so much that I threw up my arms, which was unfortunate because I was holding my tea at the time. Tea went all over my library book and onto the dog, which was sleeping at my feet. She began to bark ferociously and run from one side of the room to the other while I struggled out of my chair and went to the slider to the deck to look for the three cats. All three were right outside the sliding glass door, pawing at the glass and meowing pitifully. I opened it, and they ran in, their tails bristling like... Well, like cattails, I guess.
I turned on the outside light, stepped out onto the deck and yelled what I always yell at our local coyotes, "Bad dogs! Go home! Bad dogs!" Whether they leave because of the light or because they really think they're bad dogs is a question we'll never be able to answer, but they usually leave when I do that. I like to think the coydogs amongst them, at least, know what it means and are ashamed of themselves.
As I turned off the light and headed to bed, I couldn't help but think of another fire drill, one that happened way back before Geekdaddy was a daddy or I was a mom. We lived in a summer cabin in a small beach community with our four dogs and two cats. Our neighbor was a nice guy we called "The Exterminator," because he worked for a pest control company and told us when we first met that "every day is an adventure in the pest control business." I'm sure it was.
Every morning, the geek would take our dogs out to their pen, which was behind the house and not accessible directly via a door. They were pretty rambunctious dogs, so it was always nip and tuck as to whether he'd get them all into the pen before they escaped. One morning in early fall, after a night when we'd stayed up too late reading, the geek groggily rolled out of bed, leashed the dogs and headed out while I made breakfast. I'd just filled the teakettle when I heard a terrific clatter from outside and saw the geek run by the window toward the front yard, chasing the dogs. They were all running straight at "The Exterminator", who was waiting with his two young daughters for the school bus.
As the geek yelled imprecations at the canines, our neighbor looked more and more aghast. I wondered if he had a phobia of dogs or something. His daughters, on the other hand, seemed to think it was hilarious and were laughing their heads off. Finally, the geek captured the dogs and although he's usually the mildest mannered of men, he turned to look at our neighbor and said, "What are you looking at?"
The man just sputtered and seemed unable to speak as the geek walked back to the house. That's when I realized that my husband was completely naked. That fact just hadn't clicked for me as the chase ensued because I was focusing on our neighbor's reaction, rather than the geek. We moved a few months later to a more rural area and a house with a fenced-in yard. Now that we live in Maine, we still have fire drills But Maine is cold, so the geek always dresses for them.
Thank you for reading Life Without a Field Guide Book 1.
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Read on for excerpts from the next two books in the Life Without a Field Guide Series.
From Life Without a Field Guide Book 2, HUMOR ME:
In previous essays on the topic, I might have given the impression that I hate Maine winters more than anything. This is definitely not the case, although I must admit that I think they should come with a "best if used before date" sometime in March, and it should be strictly enforced. If we knew that the snow was going to be only up to our knees, the wind was going to be merely a mild gale and the ice was going to be off at least the deepest part of the lake by, say, March 21st, I'm sure we could all cope a little better with having our ayuhs frozen off every time we go outside.
If, for instance, I could write in red on the calendar on March 21st, First Crocus, or Golf Date with Freddie, I'd be euphoric. (And very surprised. I’ve never planted any crocuses in our yard. I don't play golf. And I don't know anyone named Freddie, come to think of it.) Well, anyway, it would be really nice to be able to put some spring things on the calendar before June, but it doesn't usually work out that way in Maine. April may be the cruelest month, but May is Blackfly Season and please note the capital letters.
We have to crowd all the spring things into the first part of June, because if we didn't, they'd run into summer, which is so short in Maine, that we can't fit all the summer things into it without running smack dab into autumn. Since our first frost is usually sometime in August, this results in a good amount of overlap, as you can imagine.
That's why, around here, you often see people out on their decks, hunched over a grill in a snowstorm, wearing shorts, a winter jacket and a hat with earflaps, with a beer in one hand and a cup of hot coffee in the other. (Grilling tip: If you find flipping your burgers difficult, omit the coffee and substitute hot buttered rum for the beer, thus freeing up a hand.)
To deal with this Seasonal Afflictive Disorder, Mainers have become adept at denial. Just today, I was making the bed and got all chuffed up because I realized it's time to put on the summer quilt. Summer. Quilt. Two words that don't even belong in the same sentence. That’s so sad. Worse, I didn't see anything odd when my son came in to tell me that he had to stop digging the garden, because six inches down, the soil is frozen. This is in April on a day when it's 78 degrees out.
This is a cruel joke that Maine pulls on us at least once every spring. It throws us a scorching hot day or two so that we'll complain so that Ma Nature can feel justified in giving us another six weeks of winter weather afterward. (I always think that the hot April days that bring out the beautiful apple blossoms early are a nice contrast to the April blizzards that freeze them solid.)
No, in spite of what I've said about Maine winters, I don't want to give the wrong impression and make you think they're at the top of my hate list. I can take Maine winters when you balance them out against the many good things that Maine has to offer. Maine has nice, low key people who hardly ever shoot anyone over traffic incidents. There are town offices in people's trailer homes where you can register your car and get laundry tips or even free kittens at the same time.
Several years ago, I scored a cute little stripy kitten, learned how to remove hard water stains, got some advice on soothing the colicky baby I had with me and registered a minivan, and the town clerk even held the baby while I signed the papers. Try to get that kind of service in a city.
I miss it now that we've moved to a town with a real town office, albeit it shares space with the volunteer fire department and our tiny library. When there’s a fire, the town clerk, her assistant and the two librarians and a janitor take off like bats out of hell, which is a tad unsettling. Not as disturbing as the fire siren, which is on top of the roof of the library part, though.
There are Annual Town Meetings where 34 people decide what to do with the town budget of $600,000 and the other 166 registered voters, who didn't vote, show up to gripe about it at every Selectman's meeting for the rest of the year. (It’s the local version of Reality TV.)
No, I want to make it clear that, while I dislike winter in Maine, I don't hate it with a vengeance. Long, cold and snowy though it may be, there are worse places to be in winter, and I’ve lived in some of them. One of them is Washington State, where I learned that they tell you about the rain, but no one mentions the wind until you've moved there.
There's upstate NY, where it's so cold and dry that the snow squeaks underfoot, and trees explode every once in a while from ice trapped inside them. While we do have the occasional random exploding tree in Maine, our snow hardly ever squeaks, and you don't have to worry about rain in the winter here. Nope, just snow and cold and the wind and ... Have I ever mentioned how much I hate winter in Maine?
From Life Without a Field Guide Book 3, Seriously?:
Well, I should have known better than to diss Richard Dawkins in a previous essay, although I don't think saying that I'm uncomfortable with his confrontational style of atheism is really dissing. I doubt very much that it would bother him if he knew that his style isn't my style. But because one of my most trustworthy critics was upset by the comment, I'll make Geekdaddy the Nameless Critic happy by writing about a subject that is near and dear to Richard Dawkins's heart - or maybe his mind.
Beards. Well, to be more precise, green beards. And if I may take this a bit further, let's slide right into slime molds with green beards. Daughter and Son and I have recently been exploring this subject because it's slime mold season in Maine. (Other states get to have Cherry Blossom season, Cheesemaking Month and Raspberry Festivals to celebrate spring. In Maine, we know it's spring when we have to replace all the fly strips because they're full. We can't sleep for the caterwauling of lovesick porcupines in the tops of pine trees and can't take three steps without slipping in what looks like dog vomit, but is, in fact, slime mold. Tra la la.)
I would like to say that our slime molds all have green beards, but that would be a lie. Richard Dawkins would probably come down on me like a load of bricks, followed by hate mail from E.O. Wilson (one of my favorite science writers, by the way) and the shades of W.D. Hamilton and Stephen Jay Gould. As I'm sure you know, only some slime molds have green beards and even those that do only have figurative green beards, so you may wonder why I even bring up the subject.
Actually, at this point in this article, I'm starting to ask myself why I brought up the subject, which seemed so straightforward when I started writing the darned thing. Well, let's begin with altruism and its place in evolution, which is what my kids and I were delving into slime molds after, so to speak. We all know that altruism is that quality which makes parents run back into burning buildings to rescue their kids, turns bystanders into good Samaritans, and got David Crosby his liver transplant. (Well, being rich and famous probably didn't hurt, but the person who donated the organ, or his or her family, was altruistic.)
It's understandable that parents would save their children and that siblings would save their siblings because it would help ensure that their "kin," people who contain their genetic material, their genes, would be more likely to survive. But why do strangers, the good Samaritans, and organ donors, help other people, often risking their lives to do so? How does that further the chances of their genes floating to the top of the gene pool?
That's where the greenbeards come in. W. D. Hamilton, the British evolutionary theorist, originated the concept. Richard Dawkins, in his book, The Selfish Gene used a hypothetical example in which having a green beard is a marker that lets individuals with a gene for cooperation recognize others with the same gene. So, to quote Dawkins, " the greenbeard gene (or genes) must do three things: establish a signal (the green beard), enable recognition of others that share the signal, and promote cooperative behavior towards other greenbeards."
What can this possibly have to do with slime molds, you ask? Plenty! The individual cells that make up slime molds usually just mooch around by themselves, digesting cellulose and minding their own business. But when a crisis arises, when their moisture source dries up or the supply of wood runs out, the individual slime mold cells that are cooperative and altruistic exude a protein (cAMP, if you must know) that other selfless slime mold cells can follow.
Gradually, as more and more slime mold cells follow this trail, a "slug" of slime molds forms and actually begins to move like a single organism, as it searches for a source of light. When it reaches it, the "slug" cells change to form a fruiting body that rises on a stalk to discharge spores into the new environment, where they will likely form new cells. Then the "stalk" dies.
If you're not thoroughly knackered by reading this harrowing description of life and death at the cellular level, you may want to pursue the subject on a slightly higher plane on Google where lizards often get into it. I will warn you, though, that things get more complicated and several new colors are introduced when you bring reptiles into the equation. But the central tenet holds true. In lizards, slime molds, and probably in humans, nature tries to filter out the less-altruistic members of society with mixed success, as far as I can tell. I'd say that Nature needs to concentrate on the Washington, DC area a little more. Or at least on the human population in seats of power there. As for the Capitol-area slime molds, most of them are still giving each other a leg up (or I guess I should say, a pseudopod up) just like they're supposed to.
So what did my kids learn from all this? Well, they didn't write reports, but apparently it made a deep impression on them because they've both been talking about it and noticing examples of altruism in animals and people. It's led to many a trip to the bookcase to check out something in our science reference books and Daughter was going to draw slime molds but gave up when they all came out looking like blobs. It did me no good to remind her that they are blobs. Artists are so temperamental.
Dawkins, Gould, and Hamilton all got looked up in Wikipedia and we'll be taking out some of their books from the library tomorrow. We broadened our knowledge of evolution, cells and simple organisms and how nature recycles plant and animal material. We've had many lunchtime discussions about how belief or lack of it affects scientists and the way they look at the world. In short, we've wrung about as much out of slime molds as we can and will probably be leaving them behind for more evolved organisms like bacteria. (Heady stuff!)
And to think that it all started when Daughter slipped in the leaves and said, "Oh crap, the dog threw up and I just stepped in it." It really is true. Every day is an adventure with Unschooling.