Human Interest | John Clarke Online

Half Magic

Long before J. K. Rowling began writing the wildly popular Harry Potter series of books on children and magic, Edward Eager wrote a similar themed book in the 1950s. In my child’s mind at that time, Eager’s book, Half Magic, was one of the most remarkable and memorable books I’d ever read. In fact, it is currently rated by some as #54 among the top 100 children’s books.

The fact that it was featured in our elementary school’s library did nothing to detract from the read. After all, that was the joy of school libraries — the ability to browse through the rows of books waiting for discovery.

There was another library book I remember, about a barnstorming pilot who for one reason or another kept crashing, and yet somehow surviving. It was exciting reading, and surprisingly did not deter me from my love of flying. But I digress.

Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I was able to identify Half Magic and download it, and read it. Presto, change-o, just like that!

But, it’s not at all what I remembered.

Here’s the thing about memory; it is ever so malleable, especially in children. All I really remembered in my teenage and adult years was that there was something in it about people who were half white and half black. Frankly I’d forgotten the whole magic theme.

What had colored my memory was the power of a vivid image found on the cover of that book, and the fact that it was popular during a time when racial integration was a frequent topic in the news. Somehow, those mental bits merged into what I believed the book to be. Many years after reading it I had the curious impression that it was a morality play of sorts, where people were in fact half black and half white.

Well, if that happened, racial profiling would be nonexistent, wouldn’t it? If you were of mixed race, with your body literally halved by distinct racial characteristics, then you obviously couldn’t be bigoted. And for that reason I held that book in high esteem. But due to my fragmented memory, I despaired of ever finding it again.

And then there was Google. While I may razz Google a bit for their intrusiveness, I do consider it a blessing to be able to Google the words “half black and half white” and see before me a panoply of related images. There, buried in the search results, was the image of a book cover that I instantly recognized from so long ago.

I had no conscious memory of it, but yet I recognized it among all the other less relevant images. (Yes, there really is such a thing as subconsciousness, just in case you wondered.)

Happily, the 50^th anniversary edition of that book was recently published, so the book is available for another generation of young minds looking for magic with a moral. And indeed, it really is a morality play of sorts. But sadly, someone felt the need to modernize the cover, which is now far more visually complex. But I wonder; is it memorable?

If I had a book cover, I’d want that cover to be memorable enough to transcend the decades, and jump out of my seemingly inaccessible memory like a Jack-in-the-Box long after all other memories of the book had faded.

I am patiently waiting for my 6-year old grandchild to be still long enough to let me read her this book. As for the rest of you, real childhood magic as portrayed in Half Magic may not be as fantastical as Harry Potter, Hogwarts School, and the dark Lord Voldemort, but it seems a lot more believable.

For more information on this memorable book:

http://magicvalley.com/lifestyles/relationships-and-special-occasions/summer-book-club-half-magic/article_b1414bf4-d895-5800-8f16-169da042a889.html

The Tragicomic Consequences of Bad Timing

They say that in comedy, timing is everything. Well, on this day my timing was badly off.

My older brother and I in Ft. Smith, Arkansas. I still remember those cowboy boots.

My brother was born five years before me, and of my siblings was the one with the most direct interaction with me as I was growing up. We shared life experiences, and apparently we shared the same quirky humor; the type that finds humor in everything, even dark moments.

I once visited him when he lived in New Orleans. During that visit he delivered a long and hilarious series of stories, most of them with a beautifully affected Cajun accent, à la Justin Wilson.

One story in particular captured my imagination, but was of unknown authorship. It started with “Here’s the story of Foot, Foot Foot and Foot Foot Foot”. The story itself had been lost from my memory, but that lead-in line was never forgotten. Decades later my brother could not remember the story either, try as he might.

Last fall I was with my brother again and I was madly searching on my phone for all the Justin Wilson jokes I could find, and sharing them with him. I was reliving some wonderful times together, even though he didn’t respond. But I knew he was smiling inside.

You see, my last surviving sibling was in hospice, and it was approaching the time for him to “slip the surly bonds of earth” as John Gillespie MaGee said so eloquently in his poem High Flight. (My brother was one of the three Clarke boys who were all pilots).

Then I thought to search the Internet for “Foot Foot Foot”.

Rabbit_Looks_Surprised_by_Monique_Haen — By Monique Haen (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

When I located the following, I read every word for the first time. In music they call this “sight reading”, and sight reading can often lead to surprises. This reading was no exception.

I started reading out-loud as I scrolled down through the text on my cell phone. I was so excited to finally find the story.

“One fine summer day, three rabbits named Foot, Foot Foot, and Foot Foot Foot were sitting in their rabbit den. Foot Foot Foot and Foot Foot were big rabbits and Foot was a little youngster.

Foot Foot said, “I’m hungry!”

“So are we,” said Foot and Foot Foot Foot.

(For full effect, this story really needs to be read out-loud, just as I was doing.)

Foot Foot said, “Foot Foot Foot and I can hop over to Farmer Brown’s cabbage patch. After we eat, we can bring some back for you, Foot.”

Little Foot stamped his little foot and said, “But I don’t want to stay here!”

“Foot,” said Foot Foot Foot, “Don’t make me put my foot down. You know that Foot Foot and I are bigger and faster and we can get away from Farmer Brown.”

So Foot Foot and Foot Foot Foot hopped over to Farmer Brown’s garden and started munching away on the delicious cabbage.

All of a sudden there was a noise and Foot Foot and Foot Foot Foot ran and hid, thinking it was Farmer Brown with his shotgun coming to get them.

“It’s just me!” said Foot, surprising Foot Foot and Foot Foot Foot.

“Foot, you are a very bad little rabbit,” said Foot Foot Foot. “You know Foot Foot and I told you to stay home.”

“I know,” said Foot, “but I said to myself, ‘I should go join my brothers Foot Foot Foot and Foot Foot and eat the cabbage too.’ “

“Well,” said Foot Foot to Foot Foot Foot, “Since he’s already here, Foot might as well stay.”

So Foot, Foot Foot, and Foot Foot Foot again started munching happily away on the cabbage.

Then Foot Foot Foot heard a loud foot fall. “I see you rabbits! And this time I’ll get you for sure!” yelled Farmer Brown.

By this time I was reading to my brother as fast as I could scroll down on the little screen.

“Foot Foot Foot yelled to Foot Foot and Foot, “Run for your lives Foot Foot and Foot!” as he scrambled back towards the rabbit den.

Now since Foot Foot and Foot Foot Foot were the older and faster rabbits, they made it back to the den before Foot did. Just before Foot reached the den, BLAM!! roared the shotgun.

After a bit, Foot Foot and Foot Foot Foot looked outside. To their sorrow, there was poor Foot, shot dead by Farmer Brown.

Foot Foot looked at Foot Foot Foot and said, “We can’t just leave Foot there, Foot Foot Foot.”

“Quite right Foot Foot,” agreed Foot Foot Foot. “Let’s give Foot a proper rabbit burial.”

So Foot Foot Foot and Foot Foot dragged little Foot to his favorite spot in the meadow and started digging.

They were almost done covering Foot up when Foot Foot looked up at Foot Foot Foot and said, “All this work has made me hungry again. Come on Foot Foot Foot, let’s go back to the garden and eat more cabbage.”

Then I scrolled down to the last line; I was really excited by now.

“Foot Foot are you crazy?” exclaimed Foot Foot Foot. “Can’t you see that we already have one Foot in the grave?”

No sooner had I read that punch line than I gasped. I couldn’t believe I’d just said that, out-loud. My brother did have, at that very moment, one foot in the grave.

But then I was graced with a mental image of my brother rolling his eyes, smiling, and saying “John, you’re such a doofas! Your timing really sucks.”

Yes, I did accidentally have lousy timing, I admit, but I can laugh about it, as I imagine he did as well, somewhere deep inside. You see, that’s what brothers do.

And what better way to share the worst of times than by sharing the best of times.

Root Causes: Some Accidents Are No Accident

Interesting flights and interesting dives provide an opportunity for post-event introspection; debriefing if you will.

Professionally, I am called upon to analyze fatalities and near-misses for the Navy and, occasionally, the Air Force. Personally, I spend even more time analyzing “what ifs” for my own activities.

For example, recently I was preparing a video of one of my more beautiful nighttime flights with a passenger, departing the coal-mining regions of Pennsylvania, heading south over the valleys and mountains of Appalachia as the early morning sun began to brighten our part of the world. Editing that video gave me a chance to reflect on the pre-flight and in-flight decisions I made that day. There were many decisions to be made, and those decisions resulted in not only a safe flight, but a spectacular flight.

But like most things, there was also a risk, calculated, and weighted, and recalculated as conditions in flight and on the ground changed in the face of aggressive weather.

In very real ways, single pilot IFR (instrument flight rules) flight is akin to cave diving. They are both technically challenging, rewarding solo activities. However, you better be on your game, or else not play.

I was cave diving before cave diving was cool; before it was considered a technical diving specialty, before safety rules and high quality equipment was available. Trimix, scooters, and staged decompression were all decades in the future, and frankly the safety record at that time was atrocious. I am alive because I had the good sense to limit my penetration; “just a little” was enough of a sobering experience, about which I have previously written.

But this posting is not about moderation; it is a warning to those who would, for whatever reason, deliberately make bad decisions, one after the other. If after a chain of such deliberate misadventures, a fatality results, then I would say that fatality is no accident. It is a procedure; a flawed process of decision making with a more or less guaranteed fatal outcome.

Dr. Tom Iliffe, Texas A&M University at Galveston

Lest you lose interest in reading this post because you believe all cave divers are loonies, rest assured that could not be further from the truth. Where I work we have four very active cave divers, highly intelligent, experienced, diving deep breathing trimix (helium/nitrogen/oxygen) when necessary using scuba and rebreathers. They are safe divers who are on the cutting edge of diving research when they’re not diving for pleasure. In fact, two of them are the U.S Navy’s diving accident investigators, so they know all too well about underwater misadventures.

Friends met early in my career have been the cave explorers of the 70’s and 80’s; names you may know like Bill Gavin and John Zumrick. Another long-time friend from the Navy’s Scientist in the Sea Program, and of whom I am quite envious, is Dr. Tom Iliffe, a biologist constantly on the front edge of underwater cave biology. (My draft novel, Children of the Middle Waters, includes a story about his beloved Remipedes.)

All these cave divers have survived due to their sane and balanced approach to risk management; moderation in all things. But sadly, not all divers I’ve come to know, one way or the other, have been so sensible and measured.

One was a wonderfully gracious man, a Navy diver who had a hobby: free diving. He’d tell me how he enjoyed surprising divers in the main cave at Morrison Springs, Florida when he would swim up to them and wave, while wearing no breathing equipment at all except that with which he was born.

I’m sure they were shocked; I know I would be.

After a while, as he gained experience with this solo recreation, he began to confide in me, and ask me questions about events he’d experienced. He told me how pleasant it was sometimes when he would surface. I warned him about shallow water blackout, loss of consciousness on ascent, and explained the physical laws that made breath-hold diving so dangerous; at least in the manner in which he practiced it.

FlMorrisonSpring — Morrison Springs, Florida. Photo licensed under Wikimedia Commons.

The last day I saw him alive, he once again came in for consultation, and told me about the euphoria he had experienced a few days before. I was of course extremely concerned and told him that what he described sounded like a near death experience. The next time he might not be lucky enough to survive, I told him. Later I heard more of that story; the previous weekend he had been found floating unconscious on the surface, but was revived.

Soon after that, this diver was again found, but this time his dive had proven fatal. His personal agenda for thrills exceeded all bounds of either training or common sense. And those thrills killed him.

The only solace I could find was that he wanted to share his experience and bravado, but he clearly was not interested in really hearing the truth, no matter how hard I worked to educate and dissuade him. While some might call this young man’s mental status as a perpetual death wish, I would argue that he never consciously thought he would die; at least not that way. Life was good, in his perspective, and I suspect he thought he was smart enough to make sure it continued that way.

Unfortunately when we were talking, we did not know just how close the end was.

5791863806_6fcd3452fc_o — Jackson Blue Spring, Marianna, Florida. Photo by Paul Clark, released under Creative Commons license.

The same was true I suspect for another well-liked diver who was the subject of a fatality report I helped write several years later. It was a rebreather fatality at Jackson Blue Spring in Marianna, Florida. The decedent was reportedly an experienced diver. I won’t belabor the story because the NEDU report is available on the internet (released by his family and available on the Rebreather Forum).

Nevertheless, the sequence of events leading to his demise involved a surprisingly long list of decision points which should have prevented the fatal dive from occurring. As each opportunity to change the course of events was reached, poor choices were made. In combination those choices led inexorably to his demise.

By now we know that even the U.S. Navy is not immune to poor decision trees. In fact, I would argue that wishful thinking is a common factor among people with intelligence and technical ability, and those with a “get it done” attitude. People who fix problems for a living are seemingly resistant to admitting that sometimes the bridge really is too far, and some problems are better fixed in the shop than in the field.

Gareth Lock of Cranfield University, Bedfordshire, U.K. is currently collecting data on diving incidents through a questionnaire on “The Role of Human Factors in SCUBA Diving Incidents and Accidents”. Like me, he has both an aviation and diving background. Gareth is serious about trying to understand and reduce diving accidents. Links to a description of his work, and his questionnaire can be found here and here. If you are a diver, please consider contributing much needed information.

The Patients, the Pilot, and the Politicians

Beechcraft_Baron_58TC — A Beechcraft Baron similar to the one used by Quest Diagnostics. (From Wikimedia Commons).

Every night a pilot from Atlanta makes a round-robin cargo flight to Albany GA and Dothan AL, then continues down to the coast to load cargo from Panama City FL, Pensacola, and Mobile AL before returning home. He used to fly a single engine Beech Bonanza, but now pilots a Baron, a twin-engine, 190 kt fast mover.

On really rough weather nights I’ve watched vicariously through FlightAware.com as he scurries away from lethal skies and diverts to any safe harbor. His cargo is your lifeblood, literally, but it’s not worth dying for.

He makes that flight each night because during the day in each of those cities patients had blood drawn at their doctor’s office. The samples that will tell the doctor the life and death stories of the day’s patients are whisked away to a large laboratory near Atlanta for processing overnight.

After taking off from Gwinnett County Airport near Lawrenceville, GA at 6 PM or so, the solitary pilot returns to his home base about midnight.

Centurion C210 — A Centurion 210; not your ordinary Cessna.

I was alerted one night that a plane I’d flown to Houston and back, a Cessna Centurion 210, had a gear collapse at the local Panama City Airport. I knew the plane well.

Unfortunately, shortly after the only runway was closed the Quest Diagnostics Baron approached the area, attempting to land. I turned on my aviation radio and heard the “850”, as it’s called, being told to hold, circling, while airfield crews attempted to move the damaged Centurion off the runway.

PFN 2007 — The original two-runway Panama City Airport, circa 2007. (Click to enlarge)

And that’s where the politicians come in.

Local Panama City politicians felt obliged to close down the Panama City airport with two runways (formerly known as PFN) and relocate to a larger facility, again with two runways. The new two runway airport, KECP, looked great in an artist’s rendition.

But artists don’t build airports. The reason why the second runway was not built is not a subject for this blog posting. What is the subject, is that promises made to the citizens of Panama City were not promises kept. And on that night as “850” circled overhead, there would be real consequences for the political decisions which had been made.

Once construction began on the main 10,000 ft long runway at the donated site, all mention of the second runway was forgotten; not by the local pilots, but by the local politicians and the land company.

Second runways serve important purposes. They are usually called “cross-wind” runways. I’ve landed many times on the cross-wind runway at PFN, and I’ve also been on Delta flights that used that runway when the wind across the main runway was dangerously high.

Cross-wind runways are not only a safety factor for overbearing wind conditions, but also provide an alternate landing site in case the main-runway is closed due to an aircraft being stuck on the runway.

That night as “850” was trying to land to pick up the day’s tissue samples from the Panama City area, the main runway was closed by the broken Centurion, and there was no backup runway. The pilot circled Panama City until his fuel became critical, and then he flew on to his next stop in Pensacola.

So all the blood drawn from patients in the Panama City area that day missed the trip to the Quest Diagnostics laboratory, due to a promise made but not kept.

But I suppose that is hardly news. Rather, it appears to be deeply woven into the very fabric of politics.

There Are No Bad People, Just Bad Code

Lately I have been puzzled by news reports about fellow scientists who are thinking not just out of the box, but out of the universe.

The first news that had me struggling was the suggestion that a universe might be the projection of a hologram. Not our universe, necessarily, but some artificial, mathematically contrived universe. Of course, the news outlets added a more dramatic flare to that headline, which on further reading was wildly misleading. I don’t think any scientist was claiming that we are actually a hologram, a three-dimensional projection of a lower dimensional us.

princess — A holographic Princess Leia in the 1977 Star Wars film, A New Hope

Try to translate for the popular press arcane notions of mathematical physics, and you’re bound to come up with some misrepresentation. We are not, I argue, like the projected holograms of Princess Leia asking Obi-Wan Kenobi for help in the Star Wars epics. However, it certainly would be interesting to think about. Who, we might ask, made the hologram, and who is projecting us and our galaxy into what we perceive to be a three-dimensional universe? Speculation could run wild.

Now there is another speculative and down-right mind-assaulting scientific proposition. As the press is representing it, it is proposed that we are “living” in a computer simulation. The actual human race may be long dead and vanished, but some technologically advanced civilization has coded a simulation of the defunct human race.

For what purpose, I have no idea. Unless of course we are not just a simulation, but a computer game wrought for educational purposes.

But perhaps that’s being too charitable. I would put odds on us being simulated for entertainment purposes.

If we be contrived entertainment, then perhaps that relieves us of some moral responsibility. We are not the ones bombing, beheading, and torturing our fellow man. The devil made us do it; with the devil being whoever made the sick part of the human simulation. Like Jessica Rabbit once famously said, “I’m not bad, I’m just drawn that way.”

Or, perhaps the base part of the human simulation is not intentionally evil, but the result of bad coding. Coding “glitches” do occur, from the ObamaCare website to computer games, with sometimes unexpected results. Most computer gamers have experienced, or have heard of, bizarre things happening when the gaming software has a glitch. Game characters may unexpectedly launch into outer space, or disembowel themselves, when all they were supposed to do was take a step forward.

In spite of what this post title says, I’m not suggesting that the published scientific assertions are in fact true. However, as a species we should at least consider the implications if they were true. What if my love affair with a young woman were simulated, or a projected hologram? The way I felt was so palpable, so vibrant that it’s hard not to believe in its reality, and its uniqueness. What if the birth of our children, and their children, was simply part of a gaming script? What if our lives were simply an immersive simulation?

For me that would make life hollow and unsatisfying. However, in my simulated brain I would still have to wonder about the person or persons who created us, the coders of the simulation. They would be, for all practical purposes, our simulation Gods.

Now that is ironic. I do not actually believe the hologram or simulation hypotheses, but I do find it interesting that these brand new scientific propositions seem to force us into considering a creator, a God. And to think, mainstream science has been trying to force us away from the belief in God for most of the last century.

So, I have to wonder, is science changing its mind?

The Positive Side of Internet Data Gathering

There is a good reason why God and aliens (of the extraterrestrial variety) use telepathy to communicate. It is the only secure form of information transmission. Everything else is subject to capture, storage, and retrieval.

There is currently a frantic paranoia spawned by national and international agency’s collection of virtually everything we say and do. The only thing not open for capture are our thoughts and dreams, at least for now. (Yes, the Army’s working on that).

But governments aren’t alone in information spying — commercial industry is perhaps outpacing governments in their data collection efforts. Their motivations may be different, but the frenetic pace and implications are every bit as invasive. Privacy, as we’ve known it, is dead.

I’ve previously written about Google Noodling , which is a way of catching Google in their data-mining efforts. And like the tone of that article, you have to take a lighthearted view of such efforts. It is not going away. And if we don’t “get over it”, we may, in my estimation, go a little crazy.

But there is a positive side to all this, and a large and growing number of people are finding this side to be personally satisfying. That has to do with family connections, or genealogy. I’ve written about that topic as well.

Scan20080_1 crop — My brother and I. He was five years older.

Last night I solved a very personal family puzzle through the help of Ancestry.com. Both my parents had brown hair and brown eyes. Both their younger children, sons, had blond hair and blue or green eyes.

I’ve spent a lot of time of late with my brother before he passed from a prolonged illness, and I was struck as never before with the purity of the blue color in his almost iridescent eyes. (I’m the one with the green eyes.) When young, both of us had blond hair, which eventually darkened with age. My brother was tall and thin. I was thin, but vertically challenged.

In the next generation, both my children have green eyes, perhaps because I married a green-eyed girl. Our daughter has blonde hair, and even a granddaughter has greenish-brown eyes. And a new grandson baby seems to have blue eyes and blond hair.

I have never ceased wondering, as did my parents no doubt, where those light colors came from. Having believed strongly in my mother’s fidelity, I kept assuming that someday I would discover the source of the blue/green eyes and blond hair.

That happened last night, thanks to the technology of digitization and data mining. I discovered a World War I selective registration document from my Grandfather who died in a hotel fire many years before my birth. At the age of 34 he had blue eyes and “light” hair. He was both tall and “slender”, pretty much a perfect description of my brother.

The next morning I was able to go through unidentified family photos, and there he was, identified at last, the Grandfather I never knew. So apparently it wasn’t the mailman after all!

Obviously this discovery is of interest to no one except my cousins and other relatives. However, it does point out the value of computers, computer databases, and the sharing of information that large databases make possible. There is a tangible reward, for both the company providing the product (the database) and the customers who benefit from the data shared.

I’m sure that when my Grandfather filled out his draft card in 1918, he had no idea that the digital image of that card would end up in the hands of his unborn grandchildren and great grandchildren 95 years later.

Which makes me wonder, what will the world know about each of us 100 years from now? We’ll be long gone, but the record of our existence will survive somewhere in the depths of a digital storage facility. Without a doubt our descendants will enjoy reading about the inane things which pleased or troubled us in 2013, and which we so freely posted thinking that no one was listening, and no one really cared.

Believe me, some people will care. And apparently, everybody’s listening.

The Day the Gorillas Were Stopped at our Door

I think one of the reasons I enjoy my grandchildren so much, and vice versa, is because they know they won’t always get a serious answer from me. They sometimes call me “silly”, but they do so with a smile. Silly is fun.

Children will assuredly get an answer to any question they ask me (within reason). However, that answer may be weighted more on the side of creativity and fantasy than on reality. They understand that, and delight in it. My instincts tell me that there cannot be too much fantasy during the playtime of young children.

As for my choice of an answer, it’s not at all a conscious decision to alter reality. I simply abhor an uninteresting answer, to anything.

Case in point: My five-year-old granddaughter found two bottles of the popular foaming adhesive, Gorilla Glue, next to our back door. “What are these for Granddaddy?”

Well, the stock answer would have been that I was gluing adapter ends to some polypropylene drainage gratings, and the Gorilla Glue would hold nicely until I could embed the gratings in concrete.

But I sincerely believe that if a writer can build on a play of words, he should. In fact, it’s almost an obligation of adults to pass on an appreciation of the joy of words.

So my answer to her was as follows: “I use Gorilla Glue in case gorillas come into our backyard to scare us. I’ll run out into the yard and glue their feet down.”

That answer was very well received.

“Why is one bottle white and one bottle brown?”

“Well of course the white gorilla glue is for white gorillas, and the brown is for brown gorillas.”

Silverback Gorilla at London Zoo, Wikimedia Commons

“Let’s go try it!” she yelled almost ecstatically.

Looking out the window I saw no gorillas, or any other animal wild or tame. “Well, I think the gorillas are hiding from us now.” Thinking like an adult, I didn’t want her to be disappointed.

“No, they’re not. We’ll just pretend,” she said with a sly wink that seemed to say, You do remember how to play, don’t you?

And with that, the five-year-old sprinted outside, paused at a spot where the threatening gorilla hoard was standing, and squirted pretend glue on pretend feet. She was fearlessly immobilizing at least six gorillas, and by my reckoning, three were white, and three were brown because she selected just the right bottle for the proper gorilla.

As proof of the effectiveness of her defensive strategy, no gorillas entered our house that day.

snowwhite — Snowflake the Gorilla, Wikimedia Commons

Now, to be fair to all gorillas, I do plan to take my granddaughter to the zoo one day and explain to her what an intelligent and peaceful, and threatened species gorillas are.

And then I’ll probably explain the real reason Gorilla Glue is named as it is. Gorillas undoubtedly use it to glue their nests together so gorilla babies won’t fall out of the trees at night.

Gorilla_nest (1) — Gorilla night nest. Photo courtesy of Jefe Le Gran, Wikimedia Commons.

Makes perfect sense to me.

The gorilla face featured photo is by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash.

Phytophotodermatitis and the Fig Tree from Hades

My fig tree is a diabolical, horticultural menace sprouted from a demon seed. I’ve tried to kill it, but it won’t die.

In general, I love trees, and figs, but this particular fig tree (Ficus carica for the Latin purists out there) has sorely offended me. It has attacked me, causing, as they say, bodily harm.

Fig Tree from Hell crop — My fig tree shortly after its attack. Looks innocent, doesn’t it?

And to top that, it doesn’t even produce edible figs. Some people call them goat figs, because only goats are undiscriminating enough to eat them. I’m guessing any goats eating my figs will be cursed — for eternity.

The conflict began like most conflicts, with an innocent encounter. I was using a water hose to tunnel under a concrete slab to install a 3-inch diameter drainage pipe. I then inserted a five-foot long piece of pipe. So far, so good.

But I decided I needed to replace that pipe with a longer, more flexible pipe, which promptly got stuck in the hole. Looking into the tunnel I’d made I saw that some relatively small roots were now in the way. I cut them with a lopper and then blindly inserted my left hand into the hole to help pull the pipe through.

It was a tight fit, and the back of my hand was grinding into the sand and the cut ends of the roots as I tussled with the pipe and finally pulled it through the hole. There was no pain associated with the sandpapering of my hand. But, as I later realized, I was grinding something toxic into the skin.

The next morning I looked at an irregular shaped red blotching on the hand. I assumed that the sandpapering from grinding against the sand grains had irritated the skin. But as time went on, the discoloration got worse, not better. A physician friend recommended a combined antibiotic and topical steroidal ointment, and bandages to protect the irritated skin. Dutifully applied for several days, that treatment resulted in absolutely no improvement. In fact, the discoloration seemed to worsen.

I continued to work on the drainage project outside, and, as it turned out, sun light seemed to make the discoloration worse.

A week later when irregular shaped blisters erupted, I realized that my skin had reacted to something in the sand, and the most likely candidate was fig tree sap from the roots I’d cut moments before inserting my hand.

The Internet revealed that fig tree sap was highly irritating to human skin. In fact, it appears to be an effective chemical weapon.

One Week Blisters — Warning: when magnified this looks pretty gross.

Quoting from AllAllergy.net, “Phytophotodermatitis is an acute skin reaction that may be easily confused with other causes of contact dermatitis. It is characterized by sunburn, blisters, and/or hyperpigmentation. The reaction takes place when certain plant substances known as psoralens, after being activated by ultraviolet light from the sun, come in contact with the skin. This report describes phytodermatitis due to contact with figs. (Watemberg 1991)”

Amazingly, the discoloration of my hand is still visible 6 weeks after the insult. But, I’m happy to report, that fig tree is not; visible that is. It was cut low to the ground. Eerily, it’s toxic sticky sap continuously coats the stump, so apparently that bedeviled fig tree is not entirely finished with its mayhem.

That sappy stump will, no doubt, be plotting a comeback this winter, out of pure botanical meanness. But I am firmly set on a plan of containment. Only time will tell whose chemical weapons are the more effective, the tree’s or mine.

Strangely, my war with the fig tree got me to thinking about art censorship. It’s true.

Most art devotees are aware of the stylistic device of placing a sculpted fig leaf in a strategic location to disguise the anatomical humanness of otherwise manly looking gods or athletes. Apparently, this form of censorship was foisted upon the art world by powerful religious prudes of the Enlightenment.

Two Weeks Fig Sap — Two weeks after exposure to fig sap.

Well, as I sulked about my long-lasting dermatological insult, I got to wondering; why would anybody even think of putting a fig leaf anywhere near what is arguably a sensitive part of the human body?

I strongly suspect that the artisans would not have deliberately incorporated fig leaves as part of their design, because they probably knew all too well just how irritating fig leaves can be.

I imagine Adam and Eve were both made rather uncomfortable by their leaves. Perhaps that was part of God’s revenge for their disobedience. Makes me wince to think of it.

But I digress. This current horror story ends like most horror stories; the foe fig is vanquished at the end. But just before the ending credits role, you catch a glimpse of the fig tree stump, still pulsing its hellish chemical weapons, and not at all fully dead. For all I know, it may already be planning its sequel, where it turns really nasty.

Lesson learned: I’ll be waiting for it, with gloved hands next time.

The Immigrants in My Backyard

I admit it; I have long been angry at the immigrants living in my backyard.

When I moved my family back to Florida over twenty years ago, I was thrilled by the sight of the beautiful green anoles (lizards) scampering over the white stucco walls of our house.

Green_Anole_Lizard — Green Anole, from Wikimedia Commons.

But over the years the native green lizards have all but disappeared, replaced by the drab brown lizards which immigrated somehow from Cuba and the Bahamas.

We can’t get Cuban rum or Cuban cigars, but we have Cuban lizards. How did that happen?

Anyway, it is a well proven scientific fact (see pages 12-28 of the linked publication) that when Cuban brown lizards move into a territory, the Green lizard population plummets. Part of the reason is because the larger brown lizards eat the young of native Green Anoles. That alone is enough to make me angry with them; although human anger is better directed towards human atrocities than against instinctive animal behavior. I know that, as a scientist, but still there is the annoyance I cannot quench at the loss of the Greens who, after all, belong here.

One particularly cold morning when the temperature had uncharacteristically dropped to 20° F overnight, I found a Brown Cuban Anole had crawled up to our front porch, trying, I suppose, to get as close to the house’s heat as possible. And there he lay, stiff and dead.

I actually rejoiced in the immigrant’s vulnerability. I remember thinking, “Bet it doesn’t get this cold in Cuba, does it? See, you should have stayed;” as if that frozen lizard had a choice in the matter.

As a matter of curiosity, and definitely not sympathy, I moved his stiff body out on the sidewalk where the warming sun rays were beginning to fall. I was thinking perhaps the local cats would like their lizard breakfast with the chill taken off it.

Imagine my surprise when I found 20 minutes later that the lizard was moving, and a few minutes after that, had managed to scurry off into the garden. Well, you have to admire toughness; and who doesn’t enjoy a surprise?

In the past couple of weeks these little guys’ toughness and their surprising lack of fear has helped me to appreciate these invaders, just a bit.

DSCN8030 — He’s hard to see; a good survival strategy.

I have been pushing my physical limits digging drainage trenches through root infested sandy soil. Much to my surprise, the Brown Cubans have been watching me, closely. Apparently my disturbance of the ground stirs up insects and small worms which the Anoles then feed upon with lightning quick forays into the digging zone.

What surprised me, however, is just how close they approach the digging. The most extreme example of lizard fearlessness was when I used a string trimmer to mow down ground-cover so I could uncover an outdoor sump pump. A Brown Cuban was hanging upside down on the stucco wall of the house, barely a foot away, with clippings from the cutter flinging at high speed into the wall where the lizard remained still but vigilant. He was completely unperturbed by the machine noise and the constant barrage of vine debris. Tough little critter, I thought.

Apparently, he had only one thing in mind; the prospect for the sudden appearance of food stirred up by the string trimmer.

During another phase of the project, what seemed like the same large Anole perched himself on any high elevation available so he could watch my digging. Every once in a while he would hop down into the disturbed dirt to snag a morsel, seeming unconcerned by the fact that a steel shovel was working the earth.

On one occasion he ran 18 inches or so right up to my foot to snag some insect I had failed to see. At the foot of the giant — yes, that little guy was fearless.

DSCN8021 — The Foreman lizard, keeping a watchful eye on my work.

OK, I had to admit, no Green Anole had ever done that before.

As I continued to work one hot Saturday, covered in sweat, I began to enjoy my constant companion. So much so that I picked up a camera and started taking photos of him, without the flash of course. I didn’t want to blind him.

On one shot the flash went off unexpectedly just inches from his face. He bolted. After 10 minutes or so, when he was nowhere to be seen, I actually felt bad, thinking that I’d scared him, or worse, blinded him. Yes, I know it was strange, that the Brown immigrant hater, me, actually felt remorse for my carelessness with the camera.

Finally, after another 30 minutes or so, he showed up again, as if nothing had happened. And with that, I felt forgiven.

Obviously, my hard attitude towards these immigrants has softened. The more time I spend with them, the more I appreciate their positive qualities: fearlessness, willingness to appreciate me as a food provider. They are in a word, opportunistic. And that, I believe, gives them an advantage over the more timid native Green Anoles.

As for the Cubans feeding on the natives? Well, they get as good as they give. Neighborhood house cats, who are certainly not native either, feed nightly on the Cubans. I cringe when I watch a cat flip an Anole, of any color, into the air and down it head first in a single gulp. That is the way of nature, and the fact that I like it or not has no influence at all on the outcome.

The Sojourner’s Dilemma; You Have to Go Home Sometime

There are sports, there are professions, then there are sojourns.

Astronauts are sojourners, as are pilots and mountain climbers and underwater divers. While the sojourner may have carefully planned his sojourn, warding off potential trouble by using good equipment and training, it is the return to normalcy that oftentimes presents the greatest and most unexpected danger.

Mountain climbers who reach the top of their mountain, don’t always make it safely back down. Astronauts reentering the atmosphere understand the risk of return all too well.

For scuba divers, return to the surface can be accompanied by decompression sickness and air embolism. When diving in cold water, the very act of rising towards the surface can induce a scuba regulator to free flow, spilling a precious gas supply.

For pilots the sojourn can end badly on landing. This fact has been in the news lately, where seemingly inexplicable crashes occurred in large transport aircraft. I shake my head and wonder why, knowing full well that once you take a sojourn for granted, it can devour you. I also know full well that I am not immune.

I was recently reminded of that during a short 34-mile flight returning a retractable gear aircraft from maintenance back to my home base, Panama City, FL. Most pilots know that, ironically, aircraft maintenance can be risky. While maintenance on diving equipment or airplanes is certainly a critical part of safe operation, at the same time it is an opportunity for a mechanic to inadvertently damage a critical component.

Snapshot gear light — Gear lights: one light is not glowing.

I have seen a maintenance-related failure of a scuba regulator, and I was about to see it with my aircraft as I followed a business jet towards a landing at our local airport. To keep traffic flowing smoothly I kept my speed up on approach until close to the runway. When I finally slowed enough to drop the landing gear I saw two green “gear safe” lights rather than the expected three. My main gear seemed to be down and locked, but the nose wheel lock indication was not glowing that reassuring green.

“Tower, I have a problem with my gear. I need to leave the area and sort out the problem.”

I left the airport airspace and spent a full hour burning fuel, running through all emergency checklist items, pulling G’s to help the gear lock down and waiting for a Southwest Airlines flight to arrive. The local airport, which receives quite a bit of commercial jet traffic (Delta and Southwest) only has one runway. If my gear collapsed on touch-down, that single runway would have been shut down for an hour or more, and arriving flights would have to land elsewhere. There are not a lot of good alternate airports near Panama City.

The sun was getting low, and I did not want to make that landing at night. Besides, my wife was below, waiting anxiously for whatever was going to happen. She was due to pick me up at the hangar, but she and I both knew the aircraft might not make it far past the touchdown point on the runway.

After flying past the tower twice and having them inspect the gear with binoculars, the tower controller said the gear looked down, but I knew there was no way to tell if it was down and locked. If the nose gear was not locked, it would collapse on landing.

Fortunately I was alone in the cockpit so I could come to grips with what I was about to do without the distraction of worried passengers. I announced my intentions to land, and on my last circuit of the field I saw the crash rescue truck and fire truck pulling into position along the runway. That was a sight no pilot ever wants to see.

As I turned towards the runway I reviewed the landing checklist one last time, and then I was ready. As I turned final it was time to get it over with. Whatever would happen would happen, and there was nothing more I could do about it.

Approaching the runway and ready to land, my mind was focused on only one thing — making the landing as smooth as possible.

The main wheels squeaked as they touched the concrete, ever so gently, and with steady back pressure on the yoke I kept the nose high, sparing the nose gear as long as possible as the plane slowed.

When gravity overcame the aerodynamic lift on the nose, the wheel settled to the runway — and rolled.

My first word to the tower was, “Thank God!”

“Indeed”, they replied. They had been holding their breath as well, as they later told me.

The next day when the mechanics drove in, it only took them five minutes to adjust a tab on the nose gear down-lock switch. Such a simple fix for such a lot of drama.

Now that I’ve had time to reflect on the incident, I’ve come to appreciate the valor of the silver-suited firefighters who approached me after the landing, the firefighters who are prepared to thrust themselves into the flames to rescue those whose sojourns have gone awry. I was also appreciative of the calm-voiced air field controller whose only weapon against calamity was the calm tone of his voice.

Calm is a good thing when you’re trying to land a plane with all the tenderness of putting a candle on a birthday cake.