Month: December 2022

My wife, Sonya, and I were in Mexico for the month of November, most of that time on the Yucatan Peninsula, visiting Mayan ruins we had not seen before, cenotes, Merida, Campeche, etc. and doing some birdwatching. Our southernmost destination was the largest forest reserve in Mexico, the Calakmul Biosphere Reserve (723,185 ha. or 1,786,990 acres) on the Guatemalan border. We spent several days visiting several ruins in the area besides the giant Calakmul city buried within the reserve, returning each night to the disgusting little town of Xpujil.

One day, we hired a birding guide, Ezekial, to take us inside the reserve to the birding hotspots. It was a fantastic day in which we saw countless species we had never seen before. We started at 4:30 a.m. and ended, exhausted around 3 p.m. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to us, while we were dancing around in excitement at what was going on in the trees, some very, very tiny beasts of evil were silently working their way up our unprotected pant legs to their target: the groin, bunolas (Spanish), and waist. In our dawn sluggishness, our guide failed to suggest that we duct tape our cuffs to our boots.

That night, as we prepared for bed, Sonya screamed when she dropped trou, her entire midsection, without going into graphic detail, was covered with hundreds of red pimples, or bites, or whatever you want to call them. She swore. For several minutes. At least. Maybe more than that. “I can’t believe it,” she said. She swore again.

   “What is it?” I asked, in my pathetic ignorance as a lifetime biologist.

    “CHIGGERS, DANGNABBIT, YOU BIOLOGICAL BUFFOON!!”

    “Now, now, calm down,” I said, a little offended at the reference to my mental state.

    “CALM DOWN, MY ASS!” I did notice that she was scratching it. “Don’t you remember Belize when I got into these little bastards years ago and they attacked me, and I STILL have the scars to prove it. That was only a few, now I have hundreds!” I vaguely remember only because they mysteriously left me alone. I did eat a lot of garlic in those days.

     “Grrrrrrr…….” She growled. “You can’t scratch them, or it makes it worse, and we have no calamine lotion, which helps a little, but not when there are this many.” More nasty language. When I dropped trou, I had some faint red dots but around the waist, but no itching, nada.

     “Just like in Belize, you must have a chigger-specific autoimmune defense system. Are you eating garlic again?”

We combed the little cesspool of a town, Xpujil, hitting the several “pharmacies” in town, all who had never heard of calamine lotion. Finally, we found some in a half-pharmacy, half-something else but I’m not sure what. I do know it wasn’t a Pemex station. We lathered her up and went to bed. Several days and a lot of lathering and 24-hour round-the-clock growling later, we were back in Merida and the itching was beginning to subside and the spots slowly, ever so slowly, fading. I kept very, quiet but very, very silently gloated to myself that I had been blessed that the Force had been with me, when I woke up in the middle of the night scratching like a hound: waist, groin, bunolas. “OH, SHIT. JHC!” I said and leaped out of bed in into the bathroom and dropped my PJ trou. My chigger autoimmune system had given up and succumbed to the microscopic beasts from Hell. Weeks later, back in Boise, life has pretty much returned to normal. But the scars are still there and will probably be there for years. I’m a little leery about going into the YMCA shower without my bathing suit on because by the time I got around to explaining what had happened and that I don’t have leprosy, the shower room would have emptied.

Aye Matey (I’m 80), so if I’m ever going to tell this story, now is the time to do it. To wait any longer is to court Dr. Dementia and the attention span and interest level of my audience. At one end of the audience age spectrum are my geriatric friends whose attention span may be seconds, if they are awake, and possessing nonexistent memories. “What story was that?” asks Fergie, age 80. At the other end of the audience age spectrum lie my three young grandsons, here forth referred to as the Seattle 3, ages 11 and twins, 8. Unless there is a shocking event every minute or so, they are out the door and on their skateboards. So, to hold them in place, I have to lie and lie big. This holds true for the sake of both ends of the age spectrum. Thus:

Opener: This story has to do with close friends of dinosaurs. The saga is about my experience visiting Antarctica 50 years ago. Thank God I have always kept journals of my travels, but even then, the story is a blend of fact and fiction, mostly fact. I throw in enough fiction to keep one end awake and the other end in the room.

The Facts:

There is a little-known pimple sticking above the ice in Marie Byrdland, West Antarctica, named after me: Greegor Peak. Sometime between 1967 and 1970, the U.S. Geological Survey needed to name numerous unnamed geomorphological features, such as mountains and glaciers, during their mapping mission in West Antarctica, in the Antarctic summer of 1967-68. Coincidently, I happened to be sampling mosses, lichens, and algae for a botany professor from Ohio State simultaneously with the USGS endeavor. My name was probably plucked off the list of field investigators, checked for any records of serious foul play in my youth, and while in Antarctica, and shazam, Greegor Peak becomes official. And still is as best I know.  

Greegor Peak is surrounded by thick ice and its 550-meter elevation is measure from sea level, so you may miss it if you blink. However, Greegor Peak could be gaining in stature as the surrounding glaciers and ice fields melt.

Fiction:

In the alternative story, for the ears of little boys and senile old men, I was a Super Hero. I saved a party of six mountaineers who were stuck on a tiny snow bridge in a bottomless crevasse, and I hauled the entire rope team out of that crevasse, hand-over-hand, biceps rippling, to safety and down the mountain to their families who were waiting for them with cookies and hot chocolate. I lied for the same reason we lie about Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. If you know anything about logistics you know that Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny are frauds. If you know anything about me, you know that my biceps have never rippled certainly not enough to haul 6 men out of a crevasse. Furthermore, I am not an altruist even if the adrenaline has red-lined. And, more to the point, glaciers and bottomless crevasses scare the PP out of me even when I was climbing mountains.

Beyond the saga of Greegor Peak, this story of 50 years ago gets more interesting to little boys because it deals with dinosaurs and half a century ago was the Dinosaur Age to them.  However more exciting the story might have been, had I told them that I lived alongside dinosaurs, I’d like to believe that they are smarter than those folks who believe Jurassic Park was a documentary.  My story involves large, extinct beasts that lived in Antarctica simultaneously with dinosaurs but weren’t technically dinosaurs. They were a significant group of extinct giant amphibians, called the Labyrinthodonts.  Paleontologically speaking, to be a dinosaur, you needed to be a reptile, and currently dinosaur descendants include snakes, turtles, and lizards. That didn’t make any difference to the Seattle 3 because while Labyrinthodonts may not have been T. rex, they still looked like bad hombres, several meters long with lots of bacteria-laden teeth, and living a semi-aquatic, semi-tropical lifestyle not unlike crocodiles but not related to crocodiles. They still had good, powerful chompers.

Labyrinthodont

Background:

The Antarctic story has to begin in 1965, as a brand-new graduate student at Ohio State I got myself involved in a 1966 summer ecological expedition to the Galapagos Islands. I lied my way onto that 4-month long summer expedition, but I don’t think the principal investigator regretted it – in the final analysis. I heard a talk given by Paul Colinvaux, a well-known paleoecologist about his upcoming expedition to the Galapagos Islands one fall afternoon. Paul said he needed one more field assistant to round out his crew and that person would need to serve as the field cook and official photographer. I leaped to the front of the room, hopping over desks to get there, and he invited me to his office for an impromptu interview. I told him that I was a good cook and an experienced photographer, neither of which were true. Fortunately, he didn’t ask me to cook some Eggs Benedict or take him to my darkroom. I used my mom’s Brownie camera on occasion and cooked liver and onions, rice, Campbell’s soups at my apartment.

Every biologist’s dream is to spend time at the epicenter of evolution and, if lucky, maybe see Darwin’s ghost. Once in the islands, Paul, dismissed my fabrication about being a chef because we cooked packaged meals in the field but when the photos were developed, he was not a happy camper, and Paul had a temper. But, miraculously, most of the important photos came out. We were collecting fossil plant pollen preserved in lake sediments to be able reconstruct the history of plants and climate back at least 10,000 years and into the last Ice Age.

The reputation I made as a worthy Galapagos field assistant got me the Antarctic assignment one year later, 1967. Another OSU professor, a botanist who had heard about my stunning reputation as a field assistant, but missed the story about my lying, asked me to take his place for a field season studying Antarctic mosses, lichens, and algae in Marie Byrdland, West Antarctica, where the Thwaites Glacier, the infamous “Doomsday Glacier” resides. The Thwaites is the widest glacier in the world and as large as Florida, and 657 miles from Greegor Peak, which is between  McMurdo Field Station, the main U.S. base, and the Thwaites Glacier (1,315 mi. from McMurdo Station).  When the Thwaites breaks off, possibly within the next five years, as in 5, and the sea level will rise several feet drowning coastal cities all over the world.

         “That’s really cool,” said the Seattle 3 in unison.

       “What’s cool about that? You live in Seattle,” I asked.

     “That you are powerful enough to destroy the world,” their eyes shining in adulation. Does it really do any harm to let them believe that I’m Doctor Doom?

Continental Drift. Before leaving for “The Ice” in December, as it is called by those in the know, that fall of 1967, we went to Washington D.C. for a workshop given by USARP – U.S. Antarctic Research Program. At that workshop, held in the Smokey Mountains when the fall colors were at their zenith, I was introduced to the concept of continental drift. This is where fossils enter the story. Fossil evidence has been a cornerstone in proving continental drift. At one point, Antarctica was part of a super-continent called Gondwana or Gondwanaland, that also included South America, India, Africa, Arabia, Madagascar, Australia, and New Zealand. Gondwana existed through much of the Mesozoic (250-66 m.y. ago and it was during this time that Antarctica sat in a more tropical position, warm and wet enough to allow dinosaurs, tree ferns, and the giant amphibians, the labyrinthodonts, who roamed Gondwana from late Paleozoic into the Mesozoic (390 -150 m.y. ago). At that time, a number of geologists still believed that the continents didn’t drift but were connected by huge land bridges that are now covered in water that allowed fauna a flora to move freely between continents. Not unlike the Bering Land Bridge that existed between Siberia and Alaska during the Pleistocene Ice Ages. But that theory was losing ground while continental drift was gaining ground. The icing left on the cake was more fossil evidence that proved conclusively that the same Mesozoic species or same genus or family was found in Africa and South America and Antarctica.

Getting to “The Ice.” Around 1:30 p.m. on a Monday, December 18, we flew out of Andrews AFB outside Washington to Travis AFB in California on a C-141 cargo-troop jet. We sat in webbed seats with no windows except the four over the emergency doors. As a New Zealand paleontologist friend put it, like flying in a giant al-u-min-ium tube. We overnighted at Travis and flew the same plane through Honolulu, Samoa and into Christchurch, New Zealand in two days, overnighting in Honolulu. In Christchurch we were outfitted with our cold weather gear which included a giant red USARP parka and huge white rubber Mickey boots and very dark, heavy Ray-Ban Aviator sunglasses. Being half blind, the lens in 1967 were glass and so damned heavy they sat on my nose like a cement block and instantly gave me a headache.

The next day, we left Christchurch for McMurdo AFB on a Constellation Tri-tail C-121, fondly called the “Connie” by those in the know. About two hours into the flight, the pilot came on the intercom and said that we were approaching the Fail-safe point and were going to have to return to Christchurch due to problems with the magnetic compass. I was scared shitless because I kept wondering how we were going to find Christchurch without a compass and had visions of going into the seriously cold soup below us with lots of floating big white things.

I told the Seattle 3 this, embellished a fair bit with visions of wandering around above the Southern Ocean, looking for an iceberg to land on.

     “Were you scared?” they asked, wide-eyed.

     “So scared I had to change my skivvies twice,” I told them. They got a kick out of that but really wanted to know why I’m still alive. I said, “The Connie pilot was a great pilot and got us to Christchurch just before we ran out of fuel.”

      “Thank God,” Jordan said. “This is one of your best stories and if you had died, we wouldn’t know how it ended.”

      “If I’d died, you wouldn’t even know how it started, and what’s more, you probably wouldn’t even be here,” I said.

      After pondering for a minute, he said, “Yeah, Baba, you just might be right about that.”

We hung around the airport for several hours conjuring up some wild tales about what really had happened to the Connie and left with an uneventful trip into McMurdo. We flew over lots of ice flows and sheets which made me think of Ernest Shackleton’s book, Endurance, about the journey he and his crew made from 1914 to 1917 when the Endurance got stuck in the ice and he kept his entire crew alive for 3 years floating around on ice floes and eventually crossing the infamous Drake Passage in a life boat to a Chilean whaling station to save every one of his crew members. Unreal story.

On The Ice. We flew into McMurdo on an ice runway without skis but after that, all trips on the ice were on Hercules C130s, equipped with skis or helicopters. It took me forever to catch a flight to my field camp, Camp #3 in West Antarctica, Marie Byrdland, about 1161 mi. west of McMurdo Station which is about 526 mi. west of the famous Greegor Peak and 169 mi. west of Thwaites “Doomsday” Glacier, which was not called the Doomsday Glacier until 2017.

A few days after a massive Christmas dinner in military mess hall where you could have as many steaks as you wanted, and an ice cream machine equipped with a billion toppings.  At that time, it was recommended that your caloric intake be at least 6000 calories per day because of the cold, but that didn’t consider that you may be totally sedentary the majority of the time you are on The Ice. In those days, going to the gym was an anathema for most of us, certainly me. Many days I pigged out three meals per day and read when I wasn’t eating.

     “Seriously?” They asked. “A billion toppings?”

     “Well, maybe not quite a billion but enough to have several bowls each meal with a different topping on each.” Which was absolutely true. I gained some serious poundage eating, sleeping, drinking and reading for several weeks waiting for clear enough weather to fly from McMurdo to Camp 3. Because the pilots needed crystal clear weather to fly, I had some time on my hands. Around New Year’s Eve, we had a party at the officers’ club and due to the fact there were no women on the ice, we all got drunk, ate a lot of shrimp cocktail and danced with each other.  At one point I hurled all over the uniform of an officer sitting in front of me, who got up and promptly left.

Another time, in an effort to get out to Camp #3, I hopped a Hercules C-130 that was headed to a field camp in the Transantarctic Mountains where the first fossil of a labyrinthodont was found in an ancient stream bed by a group of geologists from Ohio State. When the OSU team returned to McMurdo, one of the Kiwi paleontologists came into the dormitory and said to me,

“Hey mate, you’re a bloody biologist what do you think this is?” as he shoved a white, cotton-lined box in my face with a 3 in. black object in the middle of it.

     “Looks like a dog turd to me,” I said.

      “No way, mate, that’s a fossil but we aren’t sure what of.”

When I told the Seattle 3 that tale, they were shocked. “Why did you think it looked like a turd?” they asked.

“Look at the picture,” I said. “What would you call it?”

“Maybe a piece of wood, but not a turd,” G-Man said as he shook his head in disgust.

Beyond those unique adventures, we downhill skied on the most primitive rope tow I’ve ever seen, dog-sledded with the Kiwi dog team (now obsolete), went to the Dry Valleys 80 miles across the Ross Ice Shelf to sample a huge ice-free Lake Vanda, helped band 1200 Adelie Penguins at Cape Crozier, 45 mi at the other end of Ross Island–a rookery of 300,000 birds. And, finally, being forced to get a haircut at Camp 3 so the chopper pilots would give me the time of day.

    

 

“Well, lads, that about ends the Antarctic chapter of my life,” I said in a blustery tone.

      “Why did you have to get a haircut?” asked Ben.

       “Because the helicopter pilots were military men and in the 1960s if I wasn’t in the war then I was considered a hippie. They thought men with long hair were trying to avoid the war. When I got the short haircut, then I was one of them, and they would fly me wherever I wanted to go.

When I left Antarctica and returned to Christchurch on February 22, 1968, I left an exciting chapter of my life on “The Ice” behind and began the next chapter on the South Island of New Zealand. That’s another story. One month later, on March 22, I picked up a copy of the International Time Magazine one bright sunny Sunday morning in Queenstown to discover a short article about the fossil find in the Transantarctic Mts. by the OSU geologists. Instead of a dog turd, it was indeed a piece of a labyrinthodont jawbone. I said to the Seattle 3, “Had I identified that dog turd correctly when David Elliot shoved it in my face, I’d be even more famous than I am.  In addition to Greegor Peak, I might have gotten a critical fossil named after me. Or at least gotten mentioned in Time magazine.”