Category: Uncategorized

To wait any longer to tell this story is to dally with the attention span and interest level of my audience, which exists at both ends of the age spectrum. At one end are my geriatric friends, dropping into the silk-lined wooden box on a daily basis, whose attention span may be seconds when they are alive and awake.  “What was that story about you just told us?” asks Fergie, age 83. At the other end of my audience age spectrum lies my three young grandsons, here forth referred to as the Seattle 3, ages 12 and twins, 9. Unless a superhero saves the galaxy every few minutes, they’re outta here, leaping off the porch railing onto waiting skateboards. So, to keep them engrossed and in the same place, listening attentively, aI have to lie, and lie big. Lying appeals to the other end of the age spectrum, too. The saga I’m about to tell is of my experience visiting Antarctica 50 years ago. It feels like it was the Ice Age, over 10,000 years ago, and it was as far as the Seattle 3 were concerned. perhaps because there was so much ice around. It is a blend of fact and fiction, mostly fact, but primarily fiction.

Fact. Everything fell into place beautifully during that life-changing decade between undergraduate graduation in 1965 and doctoral graduation in 1975. In the summer of 1966, as an MS student at Ohio State, I joined a summer palaeoecological four month field expedition to the Galapagos Islands and Ecuador. Every biologist’s dream is to spend time at the epicenter of evolution and, if lucky, maybe see Darwin’s ghost. I lied my way onto that expedition by telling the leader that I could cook and photograph.  I had heard Paul Colinvaux, a famous paleoecologist, give a talk about his upcoming trip to the Galapagos Islands. 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 bounded over chairs to get to the front of the room, and he invited me to his office for an impromptu interview. Fortunately, he didn’t ask me to cook some Eggs Benedict or take him to my darkroom. At that time, I had only used my mom’s Kodak camera and could cook liver and onions, rice, and Campbell’s soups in my apartment.

I completed my MS in paleoecology, based on Ecuadorian data the following year and was offered an opportunity to study the plants of Marie Byrdland in West Antarctica by an OSU botany professor during the Antarctic summer of 1967. I thought it might lead to a doctoral dissertation, but it didn’t. It did result in fascinating experience in Antarctica studying mosses, lichens and algae, followed by 6 months living in New Zealand, and eventually, in 1971, a Antarctic peak named in my honor. Greegor Peak. During that Antarctic summer of 1967 and 1968, the U.S. Geological Survey was on a mapping mission in West Antarctica where I also was, and they needed to name numerous geomorphological features, such as mountains and glaciers. I just happened to be at the right spot at the right time. My name was probably plucked off the list of field investigators, checked for any records of serious foul play in my youth or when roaming the back streets of McMurdo Station, and shazam, Greegor Peak becomes official. And still is as best I know unless some senator plopped down a wad of dough to rename Greegor Peak, which is highly doubtful given its lack of prominence. It is surrounded by thick ice and its 550-meter elevation is measured from sea level not ice level, so you may miss it if you blink because the ice field is thick there, but I don’t know how thick. However, my hypothesis is that it could be gaining in stature as the surrounding glaciers, named after friends, melts.

Fiction. In the alternative story, dedicated to my grandsons and their buds, and the geezers, my buds, I was Crevasse Man. To obtain the infamous Greegor Peak name, I had to save a party of six mountaineers who were stuck on a tiny, fragile snow bridge in a bottomless crevasse on Mt. Erebus, the highest active volcano in Antarctica. I wanted to really yank their eyes out of their sockets, so I told them it was spewing hot lava down the slope toward us as I feverishly worked to save the team. Just before turning to charcoal, I hauled the entire rope team out of that crevasse, one-handed, the other hand carrying one of young maidens from another rope team who had fainted in my arms. With biceps rippling, I led the entire team around several hundred crevasses and smoldering lava 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 the truth, 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 enough to haul six mice out of a crevasse. Furthermore, I am not an altruist even if my adrenaline had red lined. Glaciers and bottomless crevasses scare the peepee out of me even just looking at them on the map. I was never sure why I climbed crevassed mountains in the first place.

This story of Antarctica 50 years ago gets most interesting to little boys because it deals with dinosaurs and to them, half a century ago was the Dinosaur Age, so I told them I’m a dinosaur, which they understand and get a kick out of.  They know better, but too many adults in this country believe Jurassic Park was a documentary. There were large, extinct beasts that lived in Antarctica simultaneously with dinosaurs who weren’t technically dinosaurs, but a significant group of extinct giant amphibians, called the Labyrinthodonts (see front piece). Paleontologically speaking, to be a dinosaur, you needed to be a reptile, and current, extant 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 choppers that could trip up little boys and run down hobbling old geezers.

“You’re saying that you saved a bunch of mountain climbers on Mt. Erebus with your so-called rippling biceps, which you don’t have, while there were sorta giant dinosaurs roaming around on the ice with nasty, dirty teeth waiting to eat you? That doesn’t sound quite right chronologically,” said G-man, the oldest of the Seattle 3.

“Not exactly,” I said, trying to lessen the magnitude of my hyperbole. “Remember, we weren’t around on Earth at the same time as the dinosaurs and their allies were roaming around. And also remember, this was a long time ago when I was a lot stronger then than I am now. My biceps were huge.”

West Antarctica is where the Thwaites Glacier, the infamous “Doomsday Glacier” resides. The Thwaites is the widest glacier in the world and as large as Florida, and is only 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, at the earliest, within the next five years, the sea level could rise several feet drowning coastal cities all over the world.

“That’s really cool,” said the Seattle 3 in unison. “Not only did you have your own mountain, but you could control the sea level from the top of your mountain by breaking off the Doomsday Glacier.” This story was rapidly getting further and further away from the truth. I had forgotten about the wild imagination of little boys. “You could flood some of the big cities of the world,” they shouted, their eyes shining in idolatry.

            “What’s cool about that?” I asked. “You live in a big city which is on the coast.”

“That’s true,” Ben admitted. But did it really do any harm to let them believe that I’m Doctor Doom, a super villain, who has control over the world?

Before leaving for “The Ice,” as it is called by those cool enough to know, in the fall of 1967, I 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 – the concept of super-continents that were in different global positions and broke up and drifted apart to their present positions. This is where fossils enter the story. Fossil evidence has been a cornerstone in proving continental drift. At one point, Antarctica was part of the super-continent called Gondwana or Gondwanaland which sat on the equator , that also included South America, India, Africa, Arabia, Madagascar, Australia, and New Zealand. Gondwana existed through much of the Mesozoic (250-66 my. ago) and it was during this time that Antarctica sat in a tropical position, warm and wet enough to allow dinosaurs, tree ferns, and the giant amphibians, the labyrinthodonts, to roam Gondwana from late Paleozoic into the Mesozoic (390 -150 m.y. ago). At that fall conference, 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 Age. 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.

On Monday, December 18, 1967, we flew out of Andrews AFB outside Washington to Travis AFB in California on a C-141 cargo-troop jet. Our ultimate goal was McMurdo Sound, Antarctica. We sat in webbed seats with no windows except those over the emergency doors. As a New Zealand paleontologist friend put it, it was 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 “The Ice” as everyone called it AFB on a Constellation Tri-tail C-121, fondly called the “Connie” in those days when it was originally commercially flown by airlines like TWA. 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 magneto 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 ice soup below us when we run out of fuel. The soup was gray with lots of floating white crackers. I told the Seattle 3 this, embellished with visions of flying around above the Southern Ocean, running on fumes, looking for an iceberg to land on.

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

     “So scared I had to change my BVDs 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.” Which may have been true, but I didn’t ask and they never volunteered that information.

      “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, Jordan said, “Yeah, Baba, you just might be right about that.”

We hung around the Christchurch airport for several hours conjuring up some wild tales about what really had happened to the Connie before we departed a second time, arriving at McMurdo without another scare. We did fly over lots of big ice bergs and sheets which made me think of Ernest Shackleton’s book, Endurance, an enthralling read about the journey from Antarctica which he and his crew made from 1914 to 1917 after the Endurance got stuck in the ice. Shackleton kept his entire crew alive for those three years floating around on ice floes and eventually crossing the deadly Drake Passage in a lifeboat to a Chilean whaling station to save every one of his crew members.

We flew into McMurdo Station on an ice runway without skis but after that, all trips on the ice were on Hercules C130s, equipped with skis or helicopters which didn’t need them. Any flying once on the ice required perfect pilot visibility for obvious reasons. My base of operations was Camp #3, 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. On the map below, the directions appear reversed.

Waiting for the right flying conditions to get to Camp #3, I gained some serious blubber eating, sleeping, drinking, reading Playboys and an occasional decent book. One day, in an effort to get out to my field site, I hopped a Hercules C-130 that was headed to a field camp in the Transantarctic Mountains before going on to Camp #3. where the first fossil of a labyrinthodont was found in an ancient stream bed by a group of geologists from Ohio State. When that same OSU team returned to McMurdo, a New Zealand 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.

Before leaving The Ice, I got a unique opportunity to help band 1200 Adelie Penguins at Cape Crozier Rookery, 45 mi from McMurdo. When I left The Ice at the Antarctic summer on February 22, 1968, and returned to Christchurch. I left an exciting chapter of my life behind and began the next chapter on the South Island of New Zealand. That’s another story. Exactly 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 same OSU geologists I knew. 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.”

The Aye Matey Band (S. Benner, B. Green, D. Greegor)

VERSE 1
(C) The ocean gave me breath, (F) sight and (C) sound,

(G) I can see her now as I’m (F) homeward (C) bound.

(C) Greenland below is (F) brown and (C) aglow,

(G) Each winter it gets just (F) a little less (C) snow.

VERSE 2
(C) Saddens me greatly, I (F) know what that (C) means,

(G) Lives in the third world will (F) suffer ex (C) tremes.

(C) If we all departed Mother (F) Earth would (C) be,

(G) A lot better off, it’s (F) plain to (C) see.

REFRAIN

(F) The blue-green marble spins innocent (C) ly,

(G) Spinning toward the (F) end of histor (C) y.

(F) Chasing the sunset, Flight Eleven Fifty (C) Nine,

(G) Turn to sunrise (F) reverse the clock of (C) time.

VERSE 3

(C) It’s not for my future that I (F) make this (C) plea,

(G) But that of my grandsons, the (F) Seattle (C) Three.

(C) The bird and the beast will (F) suffer the (C) same,

(G) Their future has only our (F) greed to (C) blame.

BRIDGE (all instruments: mandolin, guitar, harmonica)

VERSE 4

(C) 80 years gone by I’ve (F) been a (C) round,

(G) Many say, he (F) should be 6’ (C) down.

(C)I have no complaints, I (F) have some (C) dread,

(G) To live for now, our (F) future is (C) dead.

REFRAIN (harmonica)

VERSE 5

(C) Earth will claim our breath, (F) sight, and (C) sound,

(G) If Gaia is true, she’ll (F) not be a (C) round.

(C) To know her beauty, we (F) all must (C) die,

(G) And for her end, it’s (F) probably the (C) sky.

FINAL REFRAIN (all instruments)

BRIDGE (all instruments)

The UNESCO Albania Tour group of 20. Author is being crowded out of the picture in back right. The dog didn’t need a bike.

UNESCO Albania Cycle Trip

Sept 19 – 28, 2023

Albania

Albania is a country which about 30 years ago emerged from a long dark period of communism. Within the past few years, tourism has caught on like wildfire. They were still a very poor country when tourism took them pretty much by surprise a few years ago. They wanted to capitalize on that opportunity and are building hotels and resorts and repairing infrastructure like madmen and madwomen. They have several impediments to overcome that affect tourists. One, most of the citizens of Albania do not speak English and most tourists do not speak Albanian, considered to be one of the toughest languages in the world to learn. I am language-impaired, and even after living in Mexico for four years, I still speak a form of Spanish the linguistic specialists refer to as Buffoon Spanish – unrecognizable by true Spanish speakers. Two, the infrastructure is still in bad shape, which includes roads. Three, the medical care, especially outside the major cities, is weak, at least from a pampered American perspective. No ambulances or life flights in the boondocks or personal therapists to hold one’s hand while riding in the ox cart to the hospital if there is one. If not, then to the mortuary.

This past September, my wife, Sonya, and I joined an international group of 18 other cyclists to cycle for 8 straight days in Albania. Most of the group were experienced in self-torture and had experienced scrapes and falls, and maybe a few broken bones regularly. I certainly have had my share. On this trip, I had two, but not on the road where 99.9% of bike accidents are supposed to happen, but in a little cottage after the fourth day of cycling, which was a very hard day.

Group

The group including an American friend, 14 Canadians, a Norwegian couple, a Flying Dutchman, and our Albanian guide and driver. It was a grueling and action-packed, trip, somewhat different than as described in the brochure. It was a phenomenal experience in so many ways: the beautiful country and people, and our diverse group of bikers. The trip, which included mountains, plains, and the Ionian coast, was a total of 295 mi. and 21,032 ft. elevation gain, and over some horrible roads and occasionally a lot of traffic. If my wife and I hadn’t had E-bikes, our leaders would have put me on a plane home the night of Day 1. Sonya, being a final candidate for the role of Super Woman, would have made it with energy to spare.

I have kept personal names out of this saga because I suspect that some of our group were in remote Albania because they were running from something, possibly the Mounties of Canada. The group included one other ‘Merikan, besides my wife and me. Then there were fourteen tough Canadians, tough because they were all born under tree stumps in the frozen wasteland of northern Canada, raised by wolves, later to be rescued by Seargent Preston and King, his trusty husky. In that Canadian group were two physicians who pampered me with plenty of medical advice when I whined (see 2 photos below), but they didn’t have any Band-Aids. In the States, we refer to doctors as quacks if they don’t carry Band Aids everywhere. These two quacks fought over who was helping me the most. All the Canadians were solid folk, very casual and very funny.The couple from equally frozen Norway, were also conditioned to Arctic conditions, normally only inhabited by reindeer. The husband and wife were 70 and 65, respectively, and had biked all over the world for years. They were super-nice and super-tough and never said a negative word about E-bike softies or complained about anything. The only problem I had with them, and I complained bitterly to our leader about it, was that they spoke English with a Norwegian accent, and we ‘Merikans, who only speak bad Anglish, have a problem with that. There was one individual from the Netherlands, the home of Dutch Boy paint and leaky dikes, we called the Flying Dutchman, because he was FAST! You would only see the pavement melt as he went by. The Flying Dutchman was well-conditioned to long, hard rides all over the world, but his new bike wasn’t, and he had endless flat tires. I think he staged the daily leaks, discreetly jabbing a pin into his tire, so he could rest and shmooze the women. He was rugged and macho and one of the Canadian women tipped me off that he had been shmoozing my “innocent” wife. The Albanian staff got so frustrated working hours on his bike that they asked to borrow my AR-15 that I always carry to dangerous countries. They knew the United States had been dealing in assault weapons with the Albanians for years, starting their dealers out at a very young age.

Itinerary

Day 1 (Sept 19): Tirana. We gathered at our hotel in the Albanian capital and largest city, Tirana. to listen to our Albanian guide, Arjan discussing our trip agenda. Arjan (whom I first called Marlon because of a hearing loss) conveniently left out the brutality part. Even with E-bikes, which most of us had, there were several days that were definitely designed by sadists—at least for me. I’m only guessing about the others because they never whined, which I did nonstop.

Day 2 (Sept 20): Tirana to Pogradec. We bussed east from Tirana to the huge, natural Lake Ohrid, located on the Albania – Macedonia border, got dropped off above the lake, and then coasted downhill into the town of Pogradec. Ohrid is one of the most interesting lakes in the world. Deep and loaded with endemic species.

Day 3 (Sept 21): Pogradec to Korce. We cycled 32 miles south from Korce, which involved a tiny climb of roughly 450 ft. the first few miles to a plateau where we remained for 25 miles. That night we were all still in a jocular mood. At least publicly.

Day 4 (Sept 22): Korce to Sotire. By this time, we were getting comfortable with each other, which was good, because this was the first day that we were physically and mentally tested. I failed both tests. Not only did we have a significant climb after a 7-mile cruise, but the headwind was horrible. Trees were even snapping off and barns were sailing by. It made me think of Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz. By that point, I was beginning to suffer what I discretely call when I’m not in the company of schoolchildren, the “Blazing Ball Blues.” The evil twin of the BBB was the mid – shoulder blade knife stabbing issue. The twins were the nemeses of all unconditioned cyclists. That day we rode over a horrible uphill gravel stretch due to roadwork, requiring walking the bike at times. That night, we stayed at a working farm, but we could have been at Buckingham Palace. I was whipped after only three days of cycling, and thinking about the five days remaining gave me the shakes, vomiting, and a heart rate of over 200 bpm. I reminded everyone who noticed (not many) that I was the oldest rider by ten years. The next oldest were the Norwegians and the Flying Dutchman, and all three were seasoned self-abusers whom had been raised on water, black bread, Muesli, and rocks. I was raised on McFatBurgers and Domino’s Death Disk pizzas.

The Exploding Toilet Incident. That evening after showering, I was sitting with my pants fully on, putting on my shoes, and it exploded. At first, I thought it was a bomb planted in the toilet by one of my fellow riders whom I may have zoomed past that day or an Albanian communist terrorist hanging around 30 years, randomly planting toilet mines around the country.  Or Sonya??? Not so, because I was still alive. All over the bathroom were huge chunks of brittle plastic lid. Apparently, I wasn’t losing weight, a key objective of the trip.

Day 5 (Sept 23): Sortire to Benje.

The Suitcase Who Wanted to be a Shark. Around 3 a.m. the next morning,as I was doing the geriatric shuffle-stumble back from a now more-convenient-to-use-toilet, a large chunk of hell broke loose, and I nearly died, again. I didn’t but I did see a few fragments of my life pass before my eyes, and I did spout large quantities of blood all over our once-cozy room and bathroom. You know, an 80-year-old doesn’t have that much blood to eliminate. Not looking down, of course being dark and all, I had tripped over my open suitcase, and I fallen into it. Not onto the bed but INTO it. It was the tiniest that Sonya could find on Amazon with enough room for one change of clothes.  My first reaction was that the two events were linked hate crimes. The room looked like Leatherface had been there with his sharpened Stihl. Actually, as it turned out, it was the Micro-Suitcase Who Wanted to be a Shark. I take a blood thinner which allows me to bleed to death from a popped pimple or a hangnail. It didn’t help that our first aid kit consisted of 6 aspirin, 1 ChapStick, and 10 microscopic band-aids. Sonya whispered a lot of bad words that morning as she was trying to stem the flow of blood with Albanian ultra-light toilet paper. She seemed more worried about waking our neighbor than she did saving my life. The cycling that day was an easy downhill, but I still bled like a stuck pig. Not to mention that my bike seat had become the CIA’s most effective interrogation tool, surpassing waterboarding and skinning alive. Each time I dismounted, I wanted to club it to death and also get a transfusion. It made things worse that nobody was paying attention, and I was whining really loudly.

Day 6 (Sept 24). Benje to Gjirokaster. According to our daily map and route description, Day 6 was the easiest day of all, and it was.  We ended up in Gjirokaster, a premier example of a well-preserved Ottoman city. Everyone except me went on a walking tour that involved a short climb to a castle.  I was in opioid-demanding pain, so I joined our driver, Bato, for a Raki, which was 153% alcohol), the national drink of Albania. Better than Oxycodone. After one shot and you can still walk upright. Two shots and crawling become the preferred mode of travel. After three shots, your conditioned Albanian drinking companion call the undertaker. Bato also maintained that Raki was an excellent aphrodisiac, and since he spoke no English, he kept pointing to our crotches and flipping his forearm up and down like it was a puppet on a string and grinning lewdly.

Day 7 (Sept 25). Gjirokaster to Sarande. This was the day I accepted reality and hopped in the van with Bato. It was an easy day for the riders, too. It started on a windy pass after a van/cab ride for everyone to be followed by a screaming downhill to the Ionian coast. Meanwhile, in the van, Bato and I were rehashing the sex benefits of Raki. At some point, one of the Canadians joined me in the van, sick with the viral bug going around the group. Now I had someone who understood English, and I could drone on about my various maladies, while he just smiled and nodded his head. Another disgusting stoic. We stopped for a short rickety ferry ride and tour of a famous Greek – Roman UNESCO World Heritage site, Butrint. I hobbled around the site, whining. The perspective from the van allowed me to focus on other things: photography, road conditions, Raki stories, and our fantastic meals, coffee breaks, and nightly accommodations. And me.

Day 8 (Sept 26). Sarande to Himare. Cozy in the van, Bato and I conversed by laughing, giving thumbs up, high fives, etc. Meanwhile the group was toiling away climbing up and down along the coast (see profile), heading north from Sarande. This was the second toughest day with an elevation gain of over 3600 ft. The two women in the group without E-bikes, performed impressively.

Day 9 (Sept 27). Himare to Vlore. This was the toughest day of the trip, and I was still in the van. Heh, heh!  The route included a few, very steep but short climbs at the beginning, with the last climb of over 3000 ft., and up five switchbacks to Llogara Pass, which looked out over the Ionian Sea – a total of 5500 ft. elevation gain over the entire day.

During the break following the downhill, one of the tough Canadian women accidently locked herself in the bathroom. I was the next in line, feverishly working on the handle trying to free her, when her husband appeared, wondering what I was doing trying to bust in on his wife. Eventually, the owner opened the door, and she tumbled out, tactfully avoiding my waiting arms, into the arms of the Norwegian woman, an excellent example of international cooperation. At our last meal together, when we made our final comments and farewells, I told the story a little differently than it actually happened. I said that I told her husband that she was resisting my attempt to get at her and do something inappropriate. Knowing that, her husband said, “Oh, OK, if that’s all,” and then proceeded to dial the Albanian mail order bride business.

All 19 riders made it to the pass in grand style. Since the remainder was a screaming downhill run, I decided to put my suffering aside and go for it. I could not believe how rugged that made me. Arjan and Bato warned me that it was steep, and they did not want to pick up my bloody corpse in a ravine or plastered up against a tree; they’d seen the results of my agility. The ride was fantastic and so fast that I felt like a bobsledder. I managed to stay on the road.  One of the group’s strongest riders, a high-speed downhill addict, sailed off the road, crashing near the top. We came over the hill in the van and there he was – flopped over a curve barrier, like a dying salmon, and not moving. He looked dead. As it turns out, he had the wind knocked out of him and was only bruised and cut up, but no broken bones. He was relegated to the van for the remainder of the trip, which did not make him a happy Canadian. Given his skill level and fearless persona, there was talk going around that one of the jealous males in the group had sabotaged his bike. I think he staged the who thing for attention.

That night was our last night together and we were going our separate ways the next day. We told stories at dinner and laughed a lot. Even the Flying Dutchman, to whom I gave a lot of shit, had a wonderful sense of humor, apologizing to everyone for his addiction to flat tires and causing record blood pressure levels with the staff. I know we are going to miss each other; there wasn’t a bad apple in the entire group, which is rare on grueling endeavors like this one had been. It definitely was a lifetime high for me in a life of world-class adventures. Who knows, maybe we’ll join up for a ride in Siberia in the winter. Or Death Valley in the summer.

WARNING: POSSIBLE NEGATIVE, INCENDIARY POLITICAL COMMENT

After reading my idol, Heather Cox Richardson’s journal entry of yesterday whereby she paraphrases President Biden’s speech given in Freeport, Maine the previous day, I have come to a profound conclusion. His talk, apparently, was more or less a summary of the world as we currently know it. I don’t think I have to read it myself to give you my opinion regarding Biden. If you don’t believe that he will go down in history as one of our greatest presidents, then you are both deaf and blind, and possibly lacking some gray material. I realize that could be construed as an incendiary comment, but remember, you were warned, and I did say, “my opinion.”

“Facebook is supposed to be for nice things, not bodily function stories or personal sexual accounts or even politics,” my friend said after reading this story. “This story is disgusting even if it is about a cute, colorful little animal.”

“What’s disgusting about it? Defecation is a normal bodily function, and salamanders are certainly far from disgusting. They’re fascinating and beautiful and I’m an inquisitive biologist,” I said. “Furthermore, shit tolerance is in my genes. My father made a name for himself analyzing it for colon cancer detection.”

“Yeah, but you make it sound like you are focused on the salamander when in fact your focus is on the habitat,” my friend added. “I know you and you get a kick out of things that others find repugnant. For example, that story about your grandmother getting hit in the face by doodoo that you mother had emptied out the front car window of a rapidly moving car.   Your unfortunate grandma was sitting in the back seat with the window open. Or when you were a teenager and would entice your small sisters into a closet and then fart through the cracked door and laugh at their screaming. Those are just a few examples.”

As I see it, the most tragic thing about climate change is losing all the species we have already lost and will lose over the ensuing decades. As a species ourselves, we humans seem to have a penchant for wanting to roast or drown. That’s our sick prerogative, but to take down every other species in the biosphere with us, or ecocide, just because we are greedy and ignorant or just plain stupid, is not our right.   

We were headed to our cabin in the Sawtooth Mts several weeks ago, when we made a pit stop at U.S. Forest Service outhouse. When I lifted the lid to do my business, what I saw below shocked and fascinated me. Resting comfortably on a mound of TP alongside some nasty stuff, was this salamander, the protagonist of the story. Always, always, before doing a big job or even a small one, I look below. Ever so briefly.

Seemore the Salamander. I gave it the name, Seemore, for two reasons: one, I liked the old joke from the suite of jokes about funny book titles and authors, about the book, “Beneath the Bleachers” by C. Moore Butts; and two, his vantage point of actually seeing more butts than any other salamander, probably in the world. Had it been thrown in and trapped? Swam or crawled in? Fell in while using the outhouse? Gotten hungry for something different? Regardless how it got in there, I wasn’t going to relieve myself until I’d relocated Seemore.

Based on a single observation, which is lousy science, the Long-toed salamander (Ambystoma macrodactylum) is acclimating (adaptation requires genetic changes) to change, most likely; acclimation is a behavioral or physiological change only) pretty rapidly. There are hundreds of gorgeous salamanders and frogs that are either extinct or going extinct because they can’t acclimate rapidly enough, but Seemore is having none of that. He has seen the handwriting on the wall, and shifted its habitat from rotting wet longs and other wet areas where sunlight is limited, to a less appealing sunless habitat. Sunlight doesn’t get past fat asses.

Is this another example of urban adaptation like we have seen in the U.S. for so many species: coyotes, foxes, mountain lions, elk, deer, raccoons, sharks, humpback whales and squid to mention a few. I threw in the last three because sea levels are rising at alarming rates.  But for now, alligators, rattlesnakes, and black widow spiders are the only ones we can faint for if we see them. I once saw a red fox sitting outside the door of an all-night Jackson’s in McCall, Idaho. I thought it was a cardboard cutout until the cashier threw a hotdog to it.

A number of years ago, my wife and daughter were inj eastern Australia camping, when my wife went into an outhouse, lifted the seat, and starting to position herself for execution, when she discovered a huge toad or frog down in the toilet. I think it was a flush toilet which would suggest that particular amphibian had lost his crackers or had super glue on his pads. Regardless, she screamed. This frog-toad probably just liked the rush of water over its body thinking it was showering.

Is Seemore’s genetic makeup changing that rapidly that natural selection can favor butt-viewing and shit-eating, over insects under a wet, dark log? I doubt it. This was likely a fluke. However, after gingerly removing Seymour from the hole with several rubber glove and Covid mask layers on, I carried him to the small wetland a few feet behind the outhouse and left to complete my big job. When I returned, Seemore had crawled back to the outhouse and was slowly trying to burrow under it.

It was in 1964 when I last walked through the doors of a YMCA as an overnight guest. That had been in downtown Manhattan as I was heading to Europe for the summer between my junior and senior year of college. I distinctly remember that the room was not much larger than the bed, but it was clean, and the lobby and halls seemed to bubble quietly with normal, or what I perceived as a mid-60s college kid, to be normal people.

Twenty-two years later, in May of 1986, I was coerced into staying again at a Y, this time the Minneapolis YMCA, by a close friend with whom I had spent two summers, 1981 and 1982, doing research at NASA Johnson Space Center, in Texas. We were attending the annual meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), not my first choice for my only professional conference for the year, but Jim was a great friend and a university geographer from Texas A&I Kingsville (now A&M). I was a university ecologist from Nebraska. Jim was a devoted tight wad, who cut corners wherever and whenever possible. He frequently stayed at YMCAs and fleabag motels to save his per diem money provided by his university.

I soon discovered that the YMCAs of the 80s were not the YMCAs of the 60s, especially in the big cities. The clues of serious deterioration were all there, but I chose to ignore them, at least initially. When I called several months in advance to make my reservation, I thought the desk clerk had lost his voice. The silence was audible. After I introduced myself, he yells into the office, thinking he has the receiver covered with his hand,

“Hey Rip, this guy from somewhere in Nebraska is trying to reserve a double room with his buddy from Texas. Do we do that kind of stuff? Yeah, that’s what I said, a double. How the Hell am I supposed to know? He don’t sound like one.” There is a long silence while Rip was apparently going through records, probably to see if any policy existed on making reservations to gays in advance. Back on the phone, Buck says, “We don’t ordinarily make reservations, either you’re here or you ain’t, but we’ll try to reserve you and your buddy a double even though they’re hard to come by. Bye.”

May, 1986, 10^th floor, Room 1005:

“What the Hell have you gotten me into,” I blurted to Jim when we reached our $15 double. Having just walked through the chaotic, inert body-choked lobby, we now faced the worst accommodations I had seen anywhere, and that included Mexico and South America. Jim said nothing but carefully deposited an army duffle bag full of popcorn, oranges, and bagels, onto a heavily charred table. The table appeared to have suffered from a previous tenant’s attempt to build a winter warming fire. I sympathized completely; you could see your breath in the room even in May. I couldn’t imagine that they would have had the AC on.  

I had seen that same duffle bag before, in 1982, in Houston. Only then, the since-patched corner was dribbling popcorn into an immense Houston cinema. Then it had a hole that only a dedicated mouse or squirrel could drill. Jim and I had entered the movie late with the popcorn and a 6-pak of Diet Pepsi concealed under our coats. I had the Pepsi and Jim had the duffle of popcorn somehow stuffed under his coat. I’m not sure how he managed to hide an entire duffle of popcorn under his army surplus trench coat without looking pregnant, but he did.

The movie that hot Texas afternoon, was the newly released ET, and the theater was completely full except for two empty adjacent seats in the second row, mid-row. Our eyes had not adjusted to the dark, especially against the light of the mega-screen as we indiscreetly maneuvered toward the two seats with our sustenance to keep us alive for 2 hours. The children we sat on were as stunned as we were, and they screamed. The office saw our duffle of snacks and still refunded our money.

Back in our now icebox room, Jim casually dropped onto the solitary metal folding chair. I cautiously lowered myself onto one of the cots and sank into its depths to the point where my feet lifted off the floor and my butt bottomed out. I could see only the upper half of Jim. I started to itch immediately.

                “You know why I do this, don’t you?” he said.

“Well, I assume it has something to do with the fact that you’re writing a book about the Third World,” I replied.

“That’s only a part of it. The other side of that coin reveals the simple truth that I am trying to beat the Texas university system of providing a lump sum for lodging and meals.”

Then he launched into telling me about last year’s AAG meeting in downtown Detroit, one I intentionally missed because Detroiters had, at that time, a penchant for wasting each other at an uncomfortable rate, especially in the heart of the city. I, as a biologist, was interested in life, mine most especially.  In Detroit, Jim had managed to locate a YMCA very near the convention center for under $10 per night. But he was unable to find a cabby who would take him to the front door, even in broad daylight. The best he could arrange was a moving drop-off, several blocks from his destination.

When Jim and I returned to the Y our first night after an excellent KFC dinner, the lobby was packed. The crowd did not represent what my original impression from 1964 of a good socio-economic cross-section. As Jim and I cautiously snaked our way through the inert bodies, the pervasive smells of regurgitated burgundy and cigarettes added a latent dimension to our greasy dinner. Almost to the elevator, an elderly woman blocked our way to freedom.

“Would you nice-looking young gentlemen help me with my luggage? They don’t seem to have a bellhop in this establishment,” she said. Her “luggage” were of the Safeway label. No Samsonite anywhere visible in the lobby.

“You go on up to the room, I can handle this,” Jim said, as he shoved me through the closing door of the elevator. “This is right up my alley. Third World to a T.”  The elevator, under normal circumstances, is an improvement over the staircase when you’re tired and on the 10^th floor. There are exceptions. Had the Y made the decision to rip out the shag carpet floor cover to allow for frequent and thorough cleaning, it would have been a wise decision.  After the doors sealed me in, my olfactory system hit Red Alert. Simultaneously, my peripheral vision detected a grayish, lump of something propped up against a corner of my tomb. The lump was urinating into a half-pint chocolate milk carton that appeared to already be full of a chocolate-urine combo. I could see that, under the low lighting in the elevator, it could have been misconstrued as a urinal.

One hour back in our room, Jim had not yet returned. My mind envisioned bag lady accomplices dragging Jim’s bullet-riddled body toward the Y dumpster, having fleeced him for his empty wallet. I met him on the staircase coming up with a blanket under his arm.

“She doesn’t have any covers on her cot,” he explained. “Furthermore, I’ve found her fascinating. She is an intelligent, articulate woman down on her luck. Come along and have a chat with her. You’ll see what I mean.” Within seconds after introducing us in her doorway, Jim had evaporated.

Have some ice cream, my good man,” she said, and offered me some cream out of one of the paper grocery bags that filled the tiny room. She had no cones or cups and it was already oozing out onto the floor.

                “That’s okay. I’m stuffed with KFC,” I said.

“So, what meeting did you young gentlemen say you were attending?” she asked. After telling her that we had an all-day field trip, she said, “Would you mind if I joined you? I love field trips.”

“Unfortunately, the trips are restricted to the conference attendees,” I quickly countered, not knowing if that was true, but I was fairly certain she wouldn’t have passed for an academic.

Then she asked, and I never saw it coming, “Do you perhaps have a twenty that you might loan me?” Her voice had dropped considerably. “I afraid that I need money for a heart transplant.” I glanced futilely over my shoulder for some invisible support for Jim. Long gone. The hallway was empty. Even Jim, with his alleged Third World mindset and frugal tendency, would have balked. Twenty dollars would buy him one helluva lot of popcorn and maybe even a new Army duffle.

                “Do you think I would be staying in this place if I had that kind of money?” I said.

“No, that’s true, you wouldn’t be,” she conceded. “Well how about any loose change? I need to make some long-distance calls to my surgical team in New York.”

The following day, Jim and I transferred to the Minneapolis Marriot, where the meeting was being held and the other Third World geographers were staying.

Originally published Feb, 24, 1987. Potpourri Writers’ Bloc #5. Texas A&I University Literary Magazine, pp. 26-28.

Now that Aye Matey (I’m 80), I’ve circled the sun 80 times, am I supposed to be a white bearded sage sitting in the corner, smoking a pipe, pontificating, and casting juicy pearls of wisdom to be snatched up by a doting audience? Or, a smelly, black bearded pirate, mumbling with his nasty parrot in the corner, drooling into his grog, the parrot occasionally releasing droppings into his owner’s grog? The latter, according to my wife. Mexicans refer to my stage in life as the tercera edad, the third age, when you get free entry into museums and half fare on buses and free visits to the cemeteries on Dia de los Muertos. Oh, and free entry when go in box. The problem once you are officially tercera edad material, you don’t remember where your wife told you to get off the bus at the museum, so you ride around and around the city all day, staring vacantly out the window. Twenty-four hours later, you do the same thing.

Let’s pretend that I have a crystal ball and can look ahead another 80 years to 2103, and see the Seattle 3, my three grandsons, currently 11 and 9 (twins) at the ages of 91 and 89 respectively.  They’re living on the moon or Mars in sweet little suites because the Earth has become way too unpleasant to live on. Venus is out, regardless how uncomfortable the Earth gets, because Venus is nasty hot and dry. If you listen to James Hansen, retired director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and a world authority on Venus, Earth could become another Venus in a very long time. Hansen devoted the tenth chapter in The Storms of My Grandchildren, to The Venus Syndrome, a sci-fi saga in which he prophesied the extreme possibility of Earth becoming another Venus with surface temperatures in excess of 800 F. That won’t happen because we won’t continue to play the role of the frog acclimating to a slowly boiling pan of water, until he utters his final croak and croaks. We’ll be extinct or on the moon if we allow ourselves to reach the Mother of All Tipping Points (MATP), and take the Disney Land super-ride, the Downward Spiral to Venus and commit globacide. Zap!

Globacide means the whole enchilada. With a globacide, Homo sapiens species may survive to see another day if we develop the moon. But what about everything else? Globacide is pretty final for everything, including our cultural histories. I’m not a futurist, so I certainly don’t know what’s possible and what isn’t. Once on the moon, humans would have virtual reality with lions, and tigers and bears attacking us and each other for fun. According to Lewis Gordon, in the article, Can virtual nature be a good substitute for the real outdoors? The science says yes. (Washington Post, April 28, 2020).  

We may not miss the incredible natural beauty of species abundance and biodiversity and whole ecosystems like coral reefs and rain forests, but that is only from our perspective, which seems to be all we care about. What about the millions of extinct or suffering extant species’ perspective? Are we going to argue that animals like dogs, crows and octopi don’t have feelings? Can’t they love us and each other? Absolutely that your dog loves you. Your parrot loves you. What about the octopus in the documentary, My Octopus Teacher? Would her descendants and those of all other species be able to replace their authentic nature with virtual nature? Are we going to provide a virtually real world for the millions of species and hundreds of ecosystems that have gone extinct or will go extinct? So what if we can clone every species that ever lived, are we going to clone whole ecosystems and biomes? A virtual Earth on the moon? Even if virtual nature and cloning on large scales were possible, aren’t the decisions to do so dependent on our long-term survival which is dependent on an awareness of our need for survival and be able to do something immediately about the preparation needed? We knew Hitler was threatening the future of the world and we went directly to war.  Isn’t it obvious that climate change is doing the same thing now, only not as dramatic but definitely with the strong potential to destroy Earth?

Animals and plants are teaching us more every day they have feelings and maybe they sense that their lives are endangered but don’t have the capability to do anything about it. In the mid-1970s, Tom Michell rescued a barely alive, Magellanic penguin from piles of thousands of dead penguins that had been killed by an oil spill off the coast southeastern Uruguay. Forty years later Michell published a very endearing book, entitled, The Penguin Lessons, about living with a penguin, while the author was an instructor at a private school in Buenos Aires. In the final chapter Michell wrote,

“Is there any chance the world’s oceans can survive damage we are causing but just don’t we see? Thanks to inflation, it is the penguins and the rest of Nature’s descamisados (sic, innocent victims of war, economic and environmental crises, etc.) who pay the real cost of our way of life, in the only currency they have. The way we live today illustrates human capacity for dramatic change over a very short time, yet despite knowing that our modus vivendi is unsustainable, our modus operandi has so far proved incapable of bringing about measures necessary to allow wildlife populations even to equilibrate, let alone recover. What seems undeniable is that the Bank of Nature’s descamisados becomes insolvent, no amount our money will ever bail us out.” After reading this little book, I definitely believed that the little penguin, Juan Salvado, taught Tom that he had feelings and was every bit as capable of true love. So, who’s to say that animals and plants don’t have perceptions about their deteriorating homes?

Fifty-one years ago this spring, I was in northwestern Argentina studying desert armadillos for my doctoral field research and preparing to make a very tragic and costly mistake that really reflected my true attitude toward Earth and its inhabitants. I was preoccupied with thinking how I was going to ship 27 animals back to Tucson and to Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago that next August, and not have to put them in quarantine for a month in LA. I failed. Not because I couldn’t get them through customs, which I did, but because of my incredible stupidity and singular focus – in me. Ten animals were successfully shipped to the zoo, but 17 died in the Mojave Desert in the middle of the night while I slept off a drunken party. They suffocated in the closed U-Haul trailer behind me. Some of those armadillos were friends. It played out like the worst horror movie made, and I was Dr. Frankenstein. They were buried that morning in the desert under a big mesquite tree. I cried for weeks and almost gave up my plans. Since that horrific time, I’ve dedicated my life to saving Earth. From us. In my estimation, climate change has upped the ante a million-fold since the first Earth Day, and Earth Day has surpassed the Super Bowl and Mother’s Day in importance. To not celebrate Earth should result in incarceration, at least until people like me realize there may just be more important creatures and ecosystems on this planet than us.

In 2103, another 80 years and I will have gone the way of all crusty pirates, but the Seattle 3 may be around along with hopefully thousands of other species. By then we and possibly other species will be very aware of the fact that one species, Homo sapiens, was responsible for premature globacide. And even if the other species can’t fathom our crime, it shouldn’t make any difference; we took complete advantage of their naivety and vulnerability.  

So, what possible reason would we have to do that? A death wish? Passion for global termination? An addiction to human greed of money and power by a tiny minority of us who could care less about the future?  Yes, but to a much lesser extent, all of us who knowingly do not attempt to reduce our ecological footprint are guilty. What other explanation is there? Do we have a choice? Absolutely. Can we still do something about reversing the process now? Absolutely, but the clock is ticking faster and faster. The modern pirates of the world, the power mongers, need to consider their parrots are as important as they are.

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.”