Peregrine fille and Thick Cartography

Today I discovered, and joined, The Natural History Network – a group of naturalists and fellow travelers who publish a peer-reviewed journal about natural history, and who are looking for new ways to make natural history a part of the undergraduate and graduate curriculum in the United States (the network does seem to confine its interests to the U. S. at present). Many of the leaders of this organization teach at or work for enlightened institutions. Their goal of enlarging the presence of natural history in the academy is a worthy one.

Image by Mark Hineline

A change! And a new post …

I have changed the name of my blog from “Me and Peregrine fille” (the header editor won’t let me put “fille” in italics) to “Peregrine fille and Thick Cartography.” Thick cartography is the phrase I use to describe combinations of visual/spatial imagery and text. For instance, a sentence about a chickadee is a sentence about a chickadee. A picture of a chickadee is a picture of a chickadee. A chickadee range map … well, you get it.

The combination of range map, picture, and text is thick cartography. And the more informative the elements are, the thicker the thick cartography.

There is nothing especially new about thick cartography; people have been doing it for hundreds of years. A nice example of straightforward thick cartography is the multi-volume The Earth and Its Inhabitants by Élisée Reclus, a nineteenth-century French geographer and anarchist.

What’s new is a matter of art and emphasis.

Natural history writing is an art form, with a canon. The canon is overwhelmingly though not exclusively textual. Words, words, words. There is craft, not insignificant craft, in conveying the look, sound, smell, feel, taste, and extent of nature without using so much as a picture.

But it is always the best idea? Thoreau gives us a map of Walden pond, and a profile of its depth. Imagine Walden with a map of Henry’s daily orbits, of the greater Concord region, of woods and farmers’ fields. Imagine an intentionally visual and spatial book (which Thoreau would have been able to do, since he was a surveyor).

What is the point of it, you might wonder. I’m glad you asked.

As people who work in the field sciences (geology, geography, ecology, anthropology, archaeology, conservation biology, evolutionary biology, and so on) know, visual images and maps are an important and useful bridge between the world they study and the representations they make of that world (they may not put it quite like this). Visual and spatial images provide continuity, a chain of thought and work, between direct experience of raw nature and well-reasoned science.

Thick cartography is an effort to reconstruct that chain of experience and reasoning.

I will have more to say about this in the weeks and months ahead.

Snow caps

Desert plants wear varied quantities of snow after a snowfall. Joshua trees wear very little, but this plant’s flowers covered themselves with snow caps. The stems must be sturdier than they appear to bear the weight of the wet, heavy snow.

Sunday morning at Black Rock campground, Joshua Tree National Park

Peregrine fille, my 1982 Vanagon Westfalia, and I went on our first camping trip together over the weekend, along with students from a course I teach where weekend hikes and camping trips are part of the syllabus — but not required. This is a nuts and bolts report.

The weather forecast called for rain on Saturday, and again maybe on Sunday. I’m used to winter rain in the lower, Sonoran desert, which is usually a manageable affair, so I told students to ignore the forecast and keep our reservations at Black Rock campground in Yucca Valley.

I left San Diego at 2:00 on Friday with plans to take back roads over the mountains and into the desert. Alas, I took a wrong turn on a back road and added 65 miles to the trip. By the time I got to Indian Wells it was raining, and when I got to the campground it was raining harder.

Peregrine fille ran well. She is aircooled, which requires some regulation of the air passing by the engine to keep it cool. I haven’t yet found a thermostat in the junkyards, to do the regulating, so I was alarmed to watch temperatures drop under 180 degrees as I headed downhill on long grades. But other than that, she ran quite well. It wasn’t until the return trip that my psyche fully adjusted to being in third gear on interstate grades, but when it adjusted the bus and I were happy together.

Friday night’s storm was fierce, shaking the van and drenching the students’ tent with rain that came in sideways, under the fly, and then settled on the tent’s bathtub floor. I had the top of the Westy popped and was just alarmed by the fierceness of the storm. Otherwise I slept fine.

On Saturday we drove into the park. For risk management reasons I cannot take students in the bus when I drive it, which made the drive into and around the park a little lonely. But I hadn’t been in the park since 1964, when I was a lot younger. I was really excited by what I saw, and I rued the many times that I’d disdained Joshua Tree and driven by it to go to Arizona.

All day Saturday the sky was blue but the wind blew cold. We found places in the lee of big boulders to hike around and take pictures.

Back at camp later, I felt a little guilty cooking and eating inside. Everything worked, including the Dometic fridge, known for its poor performance, although I wasn’t giving in much of a workout when ambient temps were between 30-50 degrees F. But I think it may have helped keep the camper warm at night.

After supper I invited all five students to come in out of the wind. They had made brownies in a dutch oven, so we enjoyed those and played “Catch Phrase,” an electronic game that required a change of batteries.

They all went back to their tent around 8:30 and I went to bed. It was snowing, but the rangers had promised me it wouldn’t amount to much. At 10:00 the students awakened me: their tent had collapsed from the weight of the snow.

At this point, they had had enough, so they packed up and headed back to San Diego. I went back to bed in the camper and awoke to a winter wonderland. It was so beautiful that I have yet to find words for it. This is what a writer does, of course – find words for things. So I have a bit of work yet to do.

I broke camp and headed home against a brutal wind, especially on the 15 through the windmills. Once I got past Banning, though, and on to the 60, it was clear driving.

Difficulties:

- The thermostat, which I’ve mentioned. I may have to break down and buy one new.

- The fuel pump needed a bang to get going on the first morning in camp, but not the second

- The gear shift didn’t want to do R or 1st when cold. Everything else was fine.

Good surprises:

-  My new tires were superb. There was a lot of wind, but those tires kept me stuck to the road throughout.

- At 55 mph on the highway, with the iPod playing through the cassette deck, everything seemed really smooth. No sense that I was driving a woefully underpowered, overweight, 30-year old vehicle.

- At 30 degrees, with plenty of wind, the camper is cozy inside even with the top popped. I have no auxiliary heat, so this was a nice surprise. It wasn’t warm of course, but all I had to do was step outside for a second to realize how warm it was.

All in all, a good first weekend. Next month, the Grand Canyon. Yippee.

Meanwhile, I hope to add some more nuanced reports to the blog.

On a recent weekend outing with students and teaching assistants from my course “Wilderness and Human Values,” I paused on the trail to the top of Cowles Mountain in San Diego to ask: “I wonder if we’ll be able to see the ‘C’?”

My companions stared at me blankly. “It’s there,” they said, pointing away from the mountain.

No, I corrected, it was in the other direction, and we likely wouldn’t see it.

They corrected me, pointing. “It’s right there.”

There were two errors happening at once in this conversation. The first was that I had confused the “S” on Cowles Mountain with the “C” on a mountain behind the University of California, Riverside. There is no “C” on Cowles Mountain, and the enormous “S” is usually obscured except immediately after a wildfire.

Add to this the fact that my students thought I was referring to “the sea,” which had been out on the horizon for a large part of the hike.

At the top of this blog is a photograph with five primary elements: mountains, sky, pine trees, a big meadow full of sunflowers, and a road.

Of the sky, I will say nothing at all. Dickey Betts said all that needs to be said. A few clouds don’t change that.

The mountains were, at one time, a single mountain. These are the San Francisco Peaks north of Flagstaff, Arizona. The peaks formed as a stratovolcano, which either exploded or (more likely) collapsed into a hollow magma chamber.

The trees are ponderosa pines, part of the largest stand of ponderosa pine in the world, stretching from the Kaibab plateau on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon to the southern edge of the Colorado Plateau, the Mogollon Rim.

I’m going to hazard a guess about the meadow. At some time in the past, I think, this was a solid pine forest. It burned, some time in the past 150 years, and cattle have grazed the meadow and prevented the recruitment of new pines. I made the photograph in August (2007); usually the meadow tends to be grass.

The road has two names. It’s the Loop Road, and also Fire Road 545. It is named the loop road because it forms a loop through Sunset Crater National Monument and Wupatki National Monument. The National Forest Service calls it Fire Road 545 because the entrance to Sunset Crater N. M. passes through the Coconino National Forest.

I didn’t yet have Peregrine fille when I took this photograph. I was headed away from Sunset Crater in a car I rented at the airport in Phoenix, Arizona, in 2007, when I lived in Maine.

Once, on this same road, in about this same place, I was driving with my family while the sun set behind the San Francisco peaks. I know that the sun is 93 million miles away, but what I knew came into conflict with what I am pretty sure I saw: the mountains had swallowed the sun. The last rays of sunlight escaped upward in a glorious beam of light that I will never forget.

It was, of course, a miracle.

There are, crudely speaking, two kinds of science. One kind is all about the boundless nothing in particular. These sciences are well-funded and well-regarded. They make up the bulk of the science done on the campus of the University of California, San Diego, where I teach, talk, and think.

The other kind are sciences that focus on natural entities with return addresses. These other sciences are not so well funded, and are sometimes dismissed as busy work for amateurs – that is, until someone needs to know something.

One example is phenology, the study of seasonal change. Phenologists in the past included, among others, women raised in the east and transplanted to the prairies and the plains, where they recorded the first blossoms of flowers in their letters to friends and relatives back east.

Suddenly, within the last ten years, phenology has become important as a measure of climate change. But I’ve been interested in it for a longer time.

Natural entities with return address are of this world, and they have stories. The scientists who practice these sciences are, for the most part, modest and neighborly. I tend to like them.

“‘Do you keep a journal?’ — So I make my first entry to-day.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson asked the question before the dash. Henry David Thoreau answered with this entry in his journal.

How many bloggers have alluded to this quotation on their first day of blogging?

Here’s one more.