Fall Into Winter

  The temperatures have been quite chilly recently, often hovering around -5°C in the mornings.  And yet many of the maple trees have still not fully dropped their leaves.  It's been an almost daily chore for me for awhile, that of me raking the leaves into piles and then mulching them back into the lawn; and while walking the dogs the other morning I noticed one tree dropping a steady cascade of leaves, dropping them as steadily as a waterfall, constant and floating, its golden cargo releasing at different times to produce a moving picture of leaves as I watched and filmed.  But seeing that happen did get me thinking.  Did I never witness this before, me just awakening to see leaves covering the grass as if somehow during the night the trees had colluded to unload all at once?  Certainly you could often see the wind hastening the fall of many leaves but I had never before seen such a waterfall of leaves.  But why not?  With each tree having so many leaves then it now seemed natural to think that certainly the leaves could and would drop at different times.  Perhaps certain leaves clung to life a bit longer than others; or perhaps the tree itself was trying to get every last bit of energy it could from its leaves before retreating into dormancy.  How could I have missed this after so many years?  There was apparently still so much new to experience daily so what better time to learn than on a chilly day?  So curled up in a chair, I plopped a basketload of magazines and other delayed readings in front of me and excitedly prepared myself for a trip to adventure land.

Photo from Bigstock

  One of the first things, coincidentally, happened as I was nearing the completion of the lectures on archeology by Dr. Eric H. Cline.  This particular lecture was about the famed Terra Cotta Army discovered in China some 40 years ago when a farmer struck one of the objects while digging a well in his field.   My first thoughts on hearing and seeing pictures of this discovery?...1) since they were made of clay then this was their natural appearance and 2) that this must have been the tomb of a famous emperor who was 3) guarded by his "army" of warriors.  Wrong, wrong and wrong.  For one thing, these figures were actually brightly painted (exposure to air caused many of them to lose their coloring, something since rendered back on a few figures); and while this was indeed for the first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang, this was merely one of four pits uncovered (so far) with Qin's tomb still left untouched (said to be complete with a 3-dimensional map, rivers of mercury flowing over golden hills and mountains made of metal with jewels in the ceiling for the stars and moon; underground tests do appear to show a high level of mercury in the tomb area).  And while this particular pit had close to 8000 warriors, other pits reveal an entirely different picture.  Said Professor Cline in his series: Interest in the terracotta army has led to other discoveries in Shaanxi Province, including the tombs of a later emperor and his wife, buried with 10,000 to 1 million terracotta figures.  To date, 87 different signatures have been found on the figures (thought to be those of the sculptors) but only about 8 facial types and 25 facial features, at least on those figures studied so far (thus not as individualized as was once thought), although some of the newer discoveries "...have revealed dancers, musicians, and acrobats full of life and caught in mid-performance" said the earlier article.

   But what about bears?  After all, this blog is titled "a bear's journey" so I should know a little about them, shouldn't I?  But nay, nay, for it turns out that I had no idea that the evolutionary tree has them breaking off from canids (think wolves and dogs), and the common bears we know today broke off even later into the Ursinae (which has the polar and six of the eight remaining species) and the non-ursine (panda and spectacled bears), and that one type of bear lives in the Andes mountains some 15,000 feet up.  What about this, the polar bear is a carnivore but the other remaining bears are omnivorous...and for the most part bears are not big fans of honey (they're primarily after the insects).  And they don't hibernate (they can and do enter a state of dormancy which means they can awaken rather quickly and unexpectedly, something which they do on a daily basis).  Some 13,000 bears are still being raised on both legal and illegal farms for their organs (such organ poaching in the wild is still a big problem in the U.S., Canada and elsewhere).  But leaving bears and jumping to pigeons and I discovered that there are 350 breeds of them...and many young pigeons are raised for eating (by humans), although you may know them more as "squab."  And moving from pigeons over to insects, I was surprised to read about the supercolonies of ants being discovered.  Said a piece in Discover: The largest supercolony ever found spans roughly 2,500 miles.  It follows first the Atlantic coast and then the Mediterranean, from northwestern Spain to northern Italy.  Researchers estimate the supercolony’s population boasts tens of millions of queens, and worker ants in the billions.  Ants from a nest in Portugal that’s part of this super-supercolony are just as friendly to each other as they would be to their supercolony compatriots in France.  That sounds like a social network we can all learn from. 

   Further reading got me over to the lattice-like structure of a carbon atom known as graphene, something even scientists still don't fully understand since it was only theorized up until 2004.  But it turns out to be too conductive a material to be used in computers and such (which primarily use semi-conductors) but does appear to be able to purify both seawater and sewage runoff quite well, maybe because it's tiny as in 3 million layers of the honeycombed atoms are needed to reach the thickness of a single millimeter.  And by the way, that "lead" pencil you may write with is primarily graphene (okay, graphite, but the primary component of graphite is graphene).  And as long as we're on semantics, I discovered that a venom is different from a poison which is different from a toxin.  And while the Novichok nerve agent used to kill has a lethality rate of 4000 ng/kg (nanograms to kilograms in scientific talk), the deadliest poison yet known has a letahlity rate of 1-3 ng/kg...that poison is botulinum, or as it's better known in cosmetic circles, Botox.  But here's something else to bite into...our teeth.  Turns out that we humans are heterodonts and not homodonts (whaaat??); and if you really want to impress your friends, let them know that we're also diphyodont and not polyphydont (by the way, our teeth have growth rings similar to trees only ours are primarily composed of enamel).  Makes you want to scream, doesn't it?  But your scream will probably never reach the level of a rooster which crows at an ear-damaging 142 decibels (the explosive thunderclap caps out at 120 db); the rooster's saving grace is that anatomically its ear canals automatically close once its beak opens.

Antarctica from Discover; graph: Martin Künsting

   Exciting news on the physical world is the 3-D mapping of Antarctica; wait I knew about the difference between the Arctic and the Antarctic (quick quiz: what IS the difference) but East and West Antarctica?  Turns out that there's a huge difference, as in a difference which has received little attention because here's the scary part -- all that global warming and melting of the glaciers are primarily aimed at what would happen if the west side of Antarctica keeps melting at its current rate (a sea level rise of 15 feet).  But the warmer ocean currents lapping at the shores of the east side, and thus seeming to melt that side faster than expected, would lead to a sea level rise of (are you ready?)...174 feet, says Discover.  Yikes!  But that all sort of ties in to me not understanding clouds, those Cirrostratus, Nimbostratus, and Altostratus clouds all looking about the same to me (and those types of "stratus" clouds all differ from the plain old normal Stratus clouds).  Or our ingrained image of the Milky Way galaxy (us being on the outer spur of that spiral cluster)...it's really just a guess, albeit a well-educated one, since we have to accept the fact that our furthest picture-taking satellites have only now left our solar system, which alone took 35 years (our average-sized galaxy is about 100,000 light years across and of course, that means traveling at the speed of light of which we are nowhere close to obtaining).  Same with the pyramids which took thousands of years to go from experimental mounds of dirt to stepladder-like layers to higher engineering which resulted in what we picture when we hear the word "pyramid" (a better picture of this evolution can be viewed at Discover); and those pyramids cost a lot to build which is why the most recent Egyptian pyramid, Menkaure, is the smallest (said the article "They really couldn't muster the manpower or finances to do it again.")   It boggles the mind doesn't it?  So imagine what it does to computers and the data centers that keep all of this information and communication humming; the U.S. alone houses 3 million such centers which combined require the use of enough electricity to power 6.5 million homes.

   There's a point where a character in the current book by Barbara Kingsolver realizes that "some people desperately fight change and others embrace it," as noted in a review.  Said the author of her character: ...yesterday's people can't solve tomorrow's problems -- and she's a yesterday person.  I thought of that premise, that some of us, perhaps many of us, become almost tired of questioning or searching, that we fall into a lap of acceptance.  A cloud is a cloud so why bother studying their differences; leaves are on the trees one day and then on the ground in the morning.  The pyramids, finished as they are, are old news.  I've been reading a book by Jedidiah Jenkins titled To Shake the Sleeping Self and in it he writes about travel awakening the child in us, or more specifically, the child's curiosity in us.  In his opening he begins: I have learned this for certain: if discontent is your disease, travel is medicine.  It resensitizes,  It opens you up to see outside the patterns you follow.  Because new places require new learning.  It forces your childlike self back into action.  When you are a kid, everything is new...But as you get older, and the patterns become more obvious, time speeds up.  Especially once you find your groove in the working world.  The layout of your days becomes predictable, a routine, and once your brain reliably knows what's next, it reclines and closes its eyes.  Time pours through your hands like sand...But travel has a way of shaking the brain awake,  When I'm in a new place, I don't know what's next, even if I've read all the guidebooks and followed the instructions of my friends.  I can't know a smell until I've smelled it.  I can't know the feeling of a New York street until I've walked it.  I can't feel the hot exhaust of the bus by reading about it.  I can't understand the humility of walking beneath those giant buildings.  I can't smell the food stands and the cologne and the spilled coffee.  Not until I go and know it in its wholeness.  But once I do, that awakened brain I had as a kid, with wide eyes and hands touching everything, comes right back.  This brain absorbs the new world with gusto.  And on top of that, it observes itself.  It watches the self and parses out old reasons and motives.  The observation is wide.  Healing is mixed in.

   There is so much to learn and to keep learning and that doesn't mean that we have to work towards another college degree or some other such piece of paper.  The pregnant mother is learning just as much or more than the graduate student; the newly-homeless person is perhaps more alive than the person comfortably binge-watching the latest Netflix series.  But none of that is good or bad, because it's all what makes the world go around...tradition and homebodies have as much a place in this world as those who just cannot seem to settle.  But we can all just step outside and stare at the clouds and watch the leaves fall and feel the chill in the air or the wind shifting around us.  We can still marvel at the everyday and now and then just ask why something is so.

   Dr. Cline talked of his fascination with the Moche people.  Never heard of them?  Don't feel bad because neither had he.  And despite their being as thriving a race as the Mayans, Aztecs, and Incas,* they were only discovered to the world in 1987 (scientists only found their civilization in 1960; can you imagine an entire civilization being hidden?).  The early emperors of China with their buried armies of hundreds of thousands somehow wanted to vanish, to be buried deep and to be hidden on purpose.  And sometimes I think that might be us as well.  Our lives come and go and we get buried as in wanting to continue to bury our past.  We often do this physically but perhaps more often do it mentally.  What we choose to do with our present is all up to us...we can keep questioning, keep asking, keep wondering, and keep being alive.  It doesn't take much...a splash of water or a fall that lands us in a hospital, a quick comment that surprises us or a smile that does the same.  It's not a matter of being a yesterday or a tomorrow person but rather a person of now.  There is so much waiting to be discovered.  As the Beatles wrote in one of their songs: I was alone, I took a ride, I didn't know what I would find there.  Another road where maybe I could see another kind of mind there.  Be that person.  Go travel, go explore, even if its as simple as just stepping outside to watch the leaves fall or cozing up to an overdue pile of magazines on a chilly fall day...


*If, like me, your knowledge of the history of the people of Latin America (the Caribbean, Puerto Rico, and Cuba included) is a bit on the skimpy side, then a quick, funny and yet serious primer is the Broadway hit show by John Leguizamo, Latin American History for Morons.  It's being broadcast on Netflix.