A Life in the Day of a Desert Museum

Since Jao was with us for the day, and since we were trapped in a cold snap--the temperature scarcely getting into the eighties--and since the

Desert Museum can be very much like a Sonoran desert when it is hot, we decided to spend a few hours there, and a delightful few hours they were, too. Jao loves the biology more than the botany of the Museum, even when the animals are mineral.

The Bighorn sheep family has been in a family way, so their generations are showing.

One of the advantages of the river otter and other water exhibits is that there is a small ice cream shop just around the corner.

We saw Mexican Gray wolves, a pacing bear, and almost saw a young Mountain Lion taking a mid-day nap. Not all of the prairie dogs were dozing: some were on sentinel duty.

Sentinels were everywhere.

The humming bird house, or aviary, particularly fascinated Jao, not because of the birds, but because the entry and exit was secured with a curtain wall of lightweight plastic chains to discourage birds from using the doorways. One can always finds birds: a chain-link doorway is hard to ignore.

We saw a very large collection of Galloping Tourists: "Where is the next stop? Old Tucson? What is Old Tucson?" "It's where they used to make old west movies, up the road to the right." "Which way is right?"

"That way."

There were more birds outside than inside the aviary. That was only fair.

It is Spring, and the small rains of recent seasons go further than they do in what used to be the wet places. We will have to get used to that: maybe use less ice in our tonics.

Jao stayed overnight, so that his Dad could meet some friends for dinner. Jao has gone home now, and Mari is taking a nap. (There is probably a cause-and-effect story in there, somewhere.)

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Nice to Run Into You Again

We do not see things in enormous time-frames. We human beings are fairly new at figuring things out for ourselves. For instance, some people today still think of the earth as a newly created thing, perhaps ten thousand years old. Earth is actually about four-and-a-half billion years old. That is to say, the earth is 450,000 times older than the Adam and Eve story, and the universe is three times older than that! I recall first hearing that continents were slowly drifting around the earth, and that there quite likely had been several times when the continents were squeezed together. But people could stand on the edge of their own continents, and not see Africa or Asia getting closer. It took at least fifty years to figure things out. We called our continent something special. But sure enough, there have been numerous times during several-billion year history of the earth, when supercontinents formed, and eventually drifted off. ...

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

SmokeSound

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