Pingo Was Its Name-O

[pingo: (Inuit = 'conical hill') -- a semi-permanent ice-cored soil mound up to 900 feet high in the Canadian Arctic.]

There was a man who had a farm
On top of a dome of permafrost
P-I-N-G-O
And pingo was its name-o.

He had no wood, he had no twigs
Nothing to make a flame-o
P-I-N-G-O
And pingo was its name-o.

In summer he ate lots of bugs
Each meal came out the same-o
P-I-N-G-O
And pingo was its name-o.

The land was cheap, his meat would keep
No neighbors he could blame-o
P-I-N-G-O
and pingo was its name-o.

He had no life, he had no wife
No kids that he could claim-o
P-I-N-G-O
and pingo was its name-o.

He sent a letter to his friends
Which said this place is lame-o
P-I-N-G-O
and pingo was its name-o.

As he got old, he got less bold
ice-out just went and came-o.
P-I-N-G-O
and pingo stayed the same-o.

----

Are Viruses the same as Lot's Wife?

My 5-pound, 800 page, $200 biology textbook gives scant explanation to exactly how viruses differ from single-celled life. A few simple rules appear:

1. Viruses do not eat.
2. Viruses do not undergo binary fission (which all bacteria do).

It seems that until the very moment a virus encounters the cell wall of a target bacterium, it does nothing. It just sits there; its molecular and atomic structure unchanged from the moment it was 'born.' It doesn't eat, it doesn't starve, it doesn't breathe, it doesn't poop, it doesn't move. At this 'non-activated' state, a virus is indistinguishable from a very complex crystal of clay. But boy, when it makes contact with a target bacterium, it wreaks total havoc. It slyly and ingeniously commands the bacteria's DNA to make 200 copies of the virus and then kill itself.

Slyly? Ingeniously? How could an inanimate clay crystal be sly and ingenious? 

Easy. The virus (once in the cell wall), snips the bacteria's chromosomal DNA and inserts a bit of 'pirate code' into the bacterial DNA.* The bacterial DNA dutifully follows the pirated instruction sequence, one command at a time, until it's too late to stop. Upon completing the inserted pirate code, the bacteria DNA instructs itself to commit suicide, but not before making 200 or so copies of the invading virus. The cell walls explode (by command from the pirate code) and the 200 viruses fly free to continue the cycle.

Why Do Bacteria Eat?

Bacteria reproduce by splitting in half. Let's say a very simple bacteria (E. coli) contains 1 trillion atoms, when it splits each one contains 500 billion. If they split, 250 billion. And if they split, then 125 billion. In a few hours of splitting you run out of atoms! To correct this deficiency, bacteria eat things, ie. they import stuff ('food') into their cell walls to replace what was lost by splitting in two. Do bacteria eat to reproduce or reproduce because they eat? It doesn't really matter -- except they do -- and viruses don't.

Why Don't Viruses Attack Each Other? 

Think of two naked guys trying to steal each others' clothes.

Complexity from Simplicity vs. Simplicity from Complexity:

Bacteria generate complexity from simplicity (their 'food' is either sunshine and CO2 or heat + hydrogen sulfide). They create enormous complexity from the simplest raw materials. Viruses create simplicity from complexity. They attack bacteria and 'trick' the bacteria's DNA to commit suicide and produce a few hundred virus 'objects' + cellular rubble.

But Isn't This A Distinction Without A Difference?

As in, doesn't a human, eating a deer, turn a 'live deer' into just a bunch of meat and cells? Hasn't the deer been reduced from complexity to simplicity?

Good question, which is why the term 'parasite' is not very useful at any level of life. All life (except chlorophyll algae and plants) are to some extent 'parasites' (except if you call trees 'parasitic' upon sunlight). However, viruses create a very large and fundamental distinction. Viruses are not just that guy who didn't put his $10 into the check at the restaurant -- they are the guy who stole your wallet and all your money and then ate you. Viruses are nasty at an exponential level:

They make you willingly commit suicide with your own gun. 

But don't Angler fish use deception to the extreme, like tricking a little fish to thinking its fleshly lure is a worm? 

Good point. Snapping turtles do that too (with their tongues). But viruses take sensory deception to a 1,000-fold level. To understand this level-change, it's important to switch to computer language. The exact operation viruses perform on bacteria is like a computer virus inserting a 20-line piece of code into your computer's OS which says, "erase hard drive, then continue at line 2145." This is much different from a little fish drawn to near an Angler fishes' lure. This is more like an enzyme in the fishes' brain telling it to swim as fast as it can into a rock. The difference is important. A little fish fooled by an Angler fish's lure is still behaving normally -- a fish whose enzymes start turning its brains into a discombobulated pile of slop is not. But that is exactly what viruses do to the 'brain' of the bacteria -- the pirate DNA tells the bacterial DNA to turn itself into a pile of slop -- and it faithfully does it. And just before the bacterial DNA turns itself into slop, the inserted viral DNA code says, "On the way out, can you make a few hundred copies of me?"

Why Haven't Viruses Completely Destroyed All Life?

Good question. A true and competent generalist virus could (or should) be able to invade all living cells and trick their DNA into making copies of the virus and destroying themselves. They have tried ... Lord they have tried (just ask influenza in 1919). A plausible answer might be if we compare viruses to cowbirds, which never make nests but put their eggs in other birds' nests. Well ... if cowbirds won, there would not be any nests to put their eggs in and they would go extinct. Similarly, a "Viral Earth" would quickly grind to a halt since there would be no DNA left for the viruses to attack.

Are Viruses Better Described as Inorganic Crystals?

I favor this simply because viruses do not eat and do not reproduce. In the absence of viruses, bacteria would prosper quite happily for billions of years. In the absence of bacteria (or somatic cells), viruses would immediately go extinct. Rather than being life, viruses might be called adjuncts to life. But there is a clear distinction between viruses and true mineral molecules (like clay). Clay minerals will exist on a planet if there was or was never life. Viruses cannot eat clay -- they can't and don't eat anything. Without more complex DNA to pirate and subvert, viruses cannot exist.

But Don't Viruses Mutate and Evolve Much Like Life?

Correct. This is a key distinguisher between viruses and super-exotic clay crystals. Viruses contain DNA and they do mutate in the same fashion as life (incorrect copying + natural selection = evolution). We know this because influenza viruses can 'outfox' cell defenses almost as soon a new rampart is thrown upward. A working definition of a virus could be:

Virus (n.): A very small, non-heterotrophic, non-reproductive form of DNA and protein which follows Darwinian rules of mutation and selection pressure. 

-----

* Computer viruses re-write tiny sections of a computer's Operating System (OS) but leave 99.999 percent of the OS intact. A computer virus can be just a few lines of code; a computer OS comprises millions of lines of code. Without an OS, a computer virus has nothing to 'act upon.' Before bacteria, what did viruses have to 'act upon'? Think of a computer virus specifically written for a Commodore VIC-20 computer (c. 1986). Its 'code' might be still floating around in 2017, but what can it act upon?

Plate Tectonics on Mars -- a Make or Break for Life?

Olympus Mons, Mars. 70,000 ft. tall.

By Douglas Watts

SUMMARY: Most recent (2017) data indicates that while Mars had some plate tectonics around 3.5 billion years ago, it has not had any since then. While the jury is still out on whether Mars ever had or still has life, evidence seems unequivocal that Mars has not had plate tectonics like Earth for the past 3.5 billion years. Mars' crust seems to be as frozen-in-place as the Moon (and has been for 3.5 GY). Venus still has active volcanism; Earth still has active volcanism and plate tectonics. Mars does not.

For Mars, two separate issues are invoked (life; plate tectonics). Are they connected? Like Venus, Mars today has 'nowhere to go' -- its atmosphere and surface rock are in chemical, pressure and temperature equilibrium [Venus can't get cooler; Mars can't get warmer]. For Venus and Mars to be terraformed to Earth-like conditions, Venus must lose 80 percent of its atmosphere. Mars must increase its atmosphere proportionally (from 6 mbar to 700-1000 mbar). Absent giant asteroid collisions or displacements of orbital distance from the Sun, Venus and Mars appear stuck forever in their present atmospheric density, temperature and chemistry equilibria. These conditions prohibit all known life.

Two Mars features (Olympus Mons; Valles Marineris) strongly suggest the crust of Mars has been locked in place for 3+ billion years. If Olympus Mons (a classic 'hot spot' mantle volcano) was at the position of Hawaii, it would have travelled 1,500+ miles in the last 100 million years (ie. similar to Hawaii to Midway). It hasn't moved a foot. Craters on the caldera show this.

The lack of crustal movement on Mars for + 3GY is not per se prohibitive of life. But it does suggest Mars has very little heat in its crust and upper mantle. And unlike Venus, Mars is not suffering from a super-abundance of heat. On a Mars summer day (when temps. are near 70 F), at sundown it drops to -94 F. This is lower than the lowest temperature ever measured on Earth outside the Antarctic Ice Plateau (Snag, Yukon Territory, Canada at -81 F). On a cold winter night on Mars the temperature hits -216 F (the freezing point of carbon dioxide is -113 F). On a hot summer night at Mars' equator the temperature is lower than almost anywhere ever recorded on Earth.

While Mars and Earth are sometimes considered 'similar' planets -- Mars is actually more like the Moon. It's just too small to be like Earth. Mars has 1/2 the diameter of Earth, 1/6th the volume, and 1/9th the mass. Six Mars (by volume) can fit in Earth; nine Mars by mass. The ratio of surface area to volume on Mars is twice that of Earth. This means that Mars' internal heat leaks out to space twice as fast as Earth. This is a nasty conundrum since Mars started 4.5 GY ago with 11 percent of the original heat of the Earth but has been losing its heat into space twice as fast [think of a balloon or a bucket; one is 6X smaller than the other but losing its water twice as fast; which will empty faster over 4 billion years?]

The Universe is a Really, Really, Cold, Dark and Empty Place.

If you set your 'Star Trek' transporter at random, your chances of being transported to a place not at absolute zero and less than a million billion miles from the nearest warm spot would be like winning Powerball two weeks in a row. The weird thing about temperature is that its low point is bounded (absolute zero); its high point has no proportional boundaries (how about 10 million degrees !!!). Earth (and liquid water) is at the low end of the scale.

Planets have a tough time. They coalesce at 1-3,000 F but then start cooling off, like horseshoes taken out of a blacksmith's foundry. The outside atmosphere is not 40 F, but absolute zero. Radioactive decay (Uranium and Thorium) gives them some 'built-in' heat which is very slowly given off (half life of U-238 = 4.5 GY). But Mars has only 1/6th to 1/9th the 'bank account' of U/Th as Earth and sheds the heat from its U/Th bank account twice as fast. So how do planets create (and hold) their natal heat?

Tides. Jupiter's inner moon, Io, is the most volcanically active planetoid in the Solar System. Its heat source is from being pulled and tugged relentlessly by Jupiter (and its sister moons around Jupiter). Tidal friction is enough to cause a planetoid to swell, shrink and grind against itself every few days, weeks and months and generate heat friction sufficient to melt rock and make volcanoes. Venus is not as tidally heated as Io, but its ambient temp. (900F) is so high its rocks are ready to flow like thick honey with just a polite suggestion. Why is Mercury not like this? It has no atmosphere and no green house gasses to trap and keep its heat. Any potter understands it is not enough to get a temperature up to 1200 F for a few minutes; to make rock melt and flow the melting temperature must be kept up for long periods (this is called 'heat work'). This is sort of like microwaving a turkey so its skin is charred but its center is still frozen; and why in the Arctic there is 1,000 feet of permafrost below 10 feet of thawed soil on the surface. The heat-budgets (and heat budget histories) of planets and planetoids are not well understood. Since the initial seismograph on Viking 1 failed in 1976, there is still no useful seismology for Mars.

Sagan and the Drake Equation

The inference that 'some' planets in Milky Way 'must' support life (by random chance) is easily testable via exercises such as Powerball drawings. Odds of winning Powerball this week are ~ 1: 292 million. In Fall 2017, there were 21 Powerball drawings in a row without a winner. The minimum time for planets to form and cool enough to support life is at the 1-2 GY scale. At Powerball odds, a galaxy like the Milky Way could stochastically go billions of years without hitting a "Powerball winner," ie. a planet supporting life of any type (and especially, complex multicellular life).

The maximum age of the visible Universe is approx. 13.8 GY, with conditions possibly supporting life occuring at its half way point or later. (7 GY). This leaves scant room for the creation of life (most, if not all life had to have developed since 7GY when the Universe cooled down and formed stable galaxies and Sun-type, middle sequence stars). As such, a Sagan-Drake inference that there must be some planets with life somewhere would be a much better bet if the visible Universe was 130, 1300, 13,000 or 130,000 GY, in the same sense that multi-cellular life is much more probable if the Earth's age is 4.5 GY than 1 GY.

But What About Us?

Then how the Hell are we here? Good question. Maybe Earth is the first planet to support life (and multi-cellular life) in the Milky Way. Even in a race where everyone tries to lose, someone has to come in first. To take Darwinism on its face, there is no reason, impetus, cause, direction or desire for what we call *life* to evolve in the first place. Rocks and clay appear quite content just being what they are for billions and billions of years. Just as life has no direction toward complexity, the Universe has no direction toward life.

But What About Antarctic Meteorites?

Of the millions of meteorites which have landed on the Antarctic Ice Plateau in the past 20,000 years from Outer Space, one would think that one of them contained tiny bits of life adapted to live in an environment of ice and very low temperature and would form a 'colony' near the impact site. But none have. If Galactic life is highly fungible (in terms of tolerance to extremes of climate, atmosphere, temperature), then surely Earth's constant bombardment by meteorites over millions of years should have produced one viable 'seed.'

Plate Tectonics: The Forgotten Revolution

It's now hard to recall how bitterly the concept of Plate Tectonics was opposed during the 20th century.  I still have geology textbooks and stacks of professional papers from the 1960s and 1970s which grudgingly concede that plate tectonics 'could' be 'possibly' true (John McPhee's book, 'In Suspect Terrane' interviews one of the last dead-enders). Today, these books read like someone saying that since it has not yet been proven that mice do not spontaneously generate from pile of rags in the cellar, we must assume they might. Thankfully there was Apollo 11. On July 20, 1969, in one hour of specimen collection, Astronaut Neil Armstrong collected 20 pounds of Moon rocks and turned 1 million+ pounds of geology tomes into paper suited only for re-pulping. [Apollo geologist/astronaut Harrison Schmitt said of Armstrong, "Until Apollo 17 we really did not get very much good, solid descriptive work, with one exception -- Neil Armstrong. He was probably the best observer we sent to the Moon; in spite of very limited training, he just had a knack for it."]

It is not coincidental that the plate tectonics revolution of the late 1960s on Earth coincided with humans' first exploration of planets outside Earth. Absent plate tectonics, no sense could be made of the Moon (or Mars or Venus) any more than reaching the Moon via rocket at 25,000 mph could be done if it was still assumed the Earth could be the Center of the Universe and the jury was still out on Kepler and Newton. [cf. Michael Collins, 7/20/1969 to Houston: "The accuracy of the system is phenomenal. Out of a total of nearly 3,000 feet per second, we have velocity errors in our body axis coordinate system of only 1/10th foot per second in each three directions."]

Exoplanets Fuse Harmoniously Geology, Biology and Physics.

For a biologist, studying Venus seems like a giant, expensive waste of time (why not study molten lead?). But for studying the prospect of life on exo-planets, Venus is incredibly important. Venus offers the only example of what can happen when an Earth-sized planet is a bit too close to its star (and how far a 'bit' might be). For geologists, Mars offers a similar and singular example: what happens when a planet never develops plate tectonics, but all other normal activities (mantle hot spots) are intact? I think this is what folks like Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders hoped might eventually happen when they went up into the tin-cans called Apollo 8 and 11. I think they hoped that their explorations would cause the over-specialized branches of geology, astronomy, biology, physics and materials engineering (not to mention computers) to come back together. This is not unheard of. Walking up the Sheepscot River in Palermo, Maine on a rainy cold day in November, I saw a pair of 70-foot pine trees which began as separate trunks join and fused 20 feet up into one trunk, then split off again at 40 feet. It shook me. For those 20 feet, the two pine trees were living and working as one tree.

Bill Townsend -- A Lost Mentor and Friend

Book Review

"Trouble Maker -- The Memoirs of Clinton B. ('Bill') Townsend."
2017. Published by estate of Clinton B. Townsend. Canaan, Maine.
ISBN: 978-1-940244-94-5


December 1, 2017 -- Laura Rose Day just dropped off the 537-page hard-cover copy of Bill Townsend's book, "Trouble Maker," published by his family posthumously. Before I forget too much, reflect too much and cry too much, I wanted to jot down these words from reading it.

Bill's book captures what I think was his mantra, "Be passionate but speak dispassionately." Bill says in the foreword, "These memoirs are largely a record of events, not of personal relationships, although there have been plenty of the latter. No one could have led my life without plenty of social interaction. If leaving out much of that makes the material 'stiff' or boring, so be it." Like the liner notes on the first Boston record ('Listen to the record !'), this command should be appended to every sentence of this review ('Read the Book!').

Bill Townsend was born in 1927; he turned 60 in 1987. I first met Bill briefly in 1991 (when he was 64 and I was 26) but only really knew him beginning in 1997, when he turned 70. Bill died in late 2016 at age 89. From age 63 to 89 Bill did more for conservation than most people accomplish in their entire lives. Sixty-five is when most people retire; for Bill it was the start of his fourth quarter century. Bill only stopped doing conservation litigation until a few months before his passing in home hospice at his dirt-cellared farmhouse in Canaan, Maine.* Bill's brain and soul and spirit never gave out; his ticker and cell structure did. Given a few (uninvented) cell transfusions, Bill would right now be filing a procedural motion to get fish passage at the Frankfort, Maine head-of-tide dam fixed.

Despite Bill's perpetual suit and tie, he loved blues and rockabilly music. Johnny Cash's song, "I've Been Everywhere, Man ..." could be Bill's. He travelled from Tierra del Fuego to Labrador to stand in an icy river up to his waist, and put a size 12 Adams over trout, char and salmon. One day in 2006 he called me up, out of the blue, said he hired a guide and a boat just to go striper fishing near Lines Island on the lower Kennebec River. I arrived, the boat and guide was there, and we hit it. The stripers snuffed us (I think we caught 3), but Bill's determination never flagged (as a salmon fisherman, Bill well knew that fishless days are the price paid for each strike).

Bill caught lots of trout and salmon and kept them; he shot lots of duck and deer and ate them. He had dogs, cats, horses and cows and a farm and a law office in Skowhegan, Maine, where he (especially as a District Attorney) had to deal with some of the worst behavior of humans. But he took it all somehow in stride and never lost his perspective on the big picture.

At 72 he volunteered to be part of the 'mussel brigade' in 1999 to move freshwater mussels de-watered by removing the Edwards Dam on the Kennebec River in Augusta, Maine. While paid state staffers 'patrolled' in canoes, Bill got into the greasy muck to toss mussels into the river channel from Noble's Gravel Pit. This was 2 years after he had a near fatal heart attack.** Bill led by example; if mussels had to be moved, he was the first out in the goop to chuck the last handful.***

In all of my talks with Bill, often driving to a Maine Council Atlantic Salmon Federation meeting, we never talked 'big picture,' as in, "Bill, what does all of this mean?" Bill was always focussed on getting something done; and what needed to be done to get that thing done and how that could build to something bigger. It is probably a fact that Bill Townsend, as an attorney, firestarter and cheerleader, created more small, non-profit land trusts and conservation groups than any one person in Maine's history.

Like a 100 foot mural by Thomas Hart Benton, Bill's book, "Trouble Maker" is too large to digest in one view, one sitting and certainly in a brief note like this ('Read the Book!'). Each sub-chapter could easily be expanded to a short non-fiction novel in and of itself. Bill knew this while writing at age 88; I assume he hoped others would color in the details which his sketches capture. I was told by LRD that even when Bill was very sick he was adamant about his book not being 'edited.' This is understandable, Bill Townsend was a powerful, expressive and factually-meticulous writer. His style is that of Leopold and Hemingway and many of the best "just the facts, ma'am" writers of that generation.

[To give an idea of Bill's adherence to veracity, his chilling description of prosecuting a case of child rape is told almost solely through the verbatim testimony of the child from the docket record of the Maine Supreme Court.]

So as to reviewing Bill's book, I have to quote Tom Scholz of Boston in 1976 ('Listen to the Record!') and conductor Kent Nagano in 1991 ('The text is the text.'). The good news about Bill's memoir is that it leaves you hungry for a sequel. The bad news is there won't be one -- unless we help write it.

Douglas H. Watts
Dec. 1, 2017

[* I know Bill and Louise Townsend's cellar was dirt-floored because at Bill's 89th birthday party I was down there, shagging a butt, and studying the sulfidic, rusty bedrock which the house was built on back in the early 1800s on Nelson Hill Road in Canaan.]

[** Bill had a near-fatal heart attack in fall 1996 and was in intensive care for a month so. When he got out he had a Van Dyke beard (where the oxygen mask covered his nose, mouth and chin). It looked just like 'Spock's Beard' from Star Trek. I told him it made him look mean and he said, "I like that."]

[*** On August 12, 1999, at the second Edwards Dam drawdown, Bill took a nasty header on a slick rock at Bacons Rips rescuing endangered mussels. He was sore but recovered a day or so later.]

Alewife by Douglas Watts

Ordering info for: Alewife by Douglas Watts (hard copy and ebook).

"Alewife" is a personal, biological and historical account of the alewife (Alosa pseudoharengus), one of the (formerly) most abundant sea-run fish of the U.S. Atlantic seaboard. It is the only full-length treatment of the natural and cultural history of this keystone wildlife species ever written.

"Alewife" tells the story of a fish, the alewife, once ubiquitous to the eastern U.S., which is almost gone due to wholly human causes; and a never-been-told 400 year history of many long forgotten people who labored mightily to bring the alewife back. It tells the story of the fish through its own eyes and life, apart from what it 'can do' for us. It depicts a place where cultural, natural, political and legal forces wildly collide. It's about the fight for, against, and over a dimunitive but once extremely abundant fish that still continues today in state and federal court rooms across the states of the eastern seaboard. It is about what nature in our backyards meant to us in the past, what it means today and what it might mean to us 10, 20 or 50 years from now. It's a story about a lot of disparate people over 400 years and how nature and culture provoked them for good, bad and indifferent. It's not nearly complete, there are many stories still untold, but gives a flavor for the battlefield, the stakes to be lost and gained and hints to where the tipping points have been and still are. It's a hybrid, with all the advantages and disadvantages an unorthodox approach entails. Bridging gaps might be its central theme. I wrote this for an adventurous reader who is not afraid to skip a chapter and then come back to it later. It is intentionally kaleidoscopic; a multi-levelled story. The essays owe much to the series of young adult books, "Tell Me Why," by Arkady Leokum. 

The book is in two sections. One section is selected verbatim public domain record excerpts describing the species and its use and abuse by humans in New England from the 1600s to present. Most of these documents were written in quill pen, discovered and hand copied by the author, and have never seen the light of day before. The second section tells, in a personal essay style, the story of the alewife, based mostly on recent efforts in New England to protect and save them. 

The book began several years ago as the historic texts with a short introduction and was originally intended for dissemination to fisheries scientists, environmental regulators and river conservationists as a technical, factual resource. At the instigation of a fellow writer, Kerry Hardy (who wrote the foreword), I loosened up to tell in a first-person voice my many encounters with these critters in the waters of New England since childhood and the obstacles one encounters trying to help them not go extinct. It's a tough racket. These personal stories echo back to the historical texts, which detail how people 50, 100, 200 years ago tried to do the same thing and encountered nearly identical obstacles, albeit time-shifted by a century or three. 

The tone and weight of the text is balanced to make it accessible to an informed and inquisitive lay audience and to a professional scientific audience; and above all, to be fully scientifically sourced. My brother and I's personal travails trying to help alewives survive are deliberately told in a 'camp-fire' fashion and with the level of humor and absurdity the details deserve. 

About the Author

Douglas Watts was born in North Easton, Massachusetts in 1964 a few dozen miles from Cape Cod and the Atlantic Ocean in southeastern Massachusetts and spent most of his childhood up to his waist in ponds and brooks and saltwater. He received his education in journalism and English at the Univ. of Maine at Orono from 1982-1986. In 1986 he began work as a full-time newspaper and magazine reporter, editor and photographer in Maine and Massachusetts for a variety of small and large newspapers and then as a conservation writer for the Maine Sportsman magazine, the Atlantic Salmon Journal, Wild Steelhead & Salmon, and Corporate Challenge News. Since 1999 he has worked full-time as a professional consultant for numerous New England conservation groups, doing ecological and legal research on the history and health of New England's coastal river ecosystems. This historic research forms the bulk and inspiration of "Alewife." Since 1998, he has been a plaintiff and/or principal researcher in numerous legal cases in Maine and Massachusetts regarding restoring native sea-run fish to rivers of the northeastern U.S. His historic research has been used and cited by the United States Supreme Court in a landmark 2006 Clean Water Act case, S.D. Warren v. Maine BEP, and by the National Academy of Science in its 2004 monograph on the status of native Atlantic salmon in the United States. His advocacy on behalf of the American eel is featured in a Sept. 2010 National Geographic story by writer and artist James Prosek and his book on the same topic, "Eels," (Harper Collins 2010). He was a consultant and subject in the 2003 film "Troubled Waters: the Dilemma of Dams" by Beth and George Gage, featured at the Telluride Film Festival and Maine Film Festival.  

Hunt-Libby Special Project No. 1 by Sonny Probe

Hunt-Libby Special Project No. 1

An Opera in Four Acts by Sonny Probe

I. Act One  

Their Assault on Our Assault on Their Liberties

1. Bay of Pigs Veterans Clandestine Radio Goo Goo.

2. Launch of  the Prostitute Yachts in Baltimore Harbor.

3. Sirhan B. Sirhan, James Earl Ray and Pete Cosey.

4. To Put it Bluntly, How to Screw Our Political Enemies.

II. Act Two

A Firm but Measured Response Involving Burglary

5. Cuban Exiles Wtd, Mad Sklz w/ Lck Pks gd.

6. He's Dr. Feel Ding.

7. Watergate Break-In Memorial Day Bake No. 1. 

8. Watergate Break-In Flag Day Bake No. 2.

Intermission w/ Complimentary Pinot Noir, Deviled Eggs

and Consensual Pocket Litter Exchange.

III. Act Three 

Yeah, We Jam on Wednesdays at this D.C. Modified Limited Hangout.

9. John W. Dean Karaoke Night.

10. Jeb Stuart Magruder Home Organ Samba Freak-Out.

11. Facing the Constituents at Home on Rat Poison.

12. CREEP Political Memorandum No. 18.

13. John and Joni Mitchell Up In A Tree.

IV. Act Four 

Cleaning Up Behind the Elephant.

14. The Sam Ervin Galatians Mahlerian Aria.

15. Edmund Sixtus Muskie Goes All Frank Marino.

16. Impeach Earl Warren !!!

17. Flying Mr. Johnson Into Space.

Deux ex Machina, Global Licensing Claim/Disclaimer

and Location of Fire Exits and Restrooms.

Hunt-Liddy Special Project No. 1, the revenue generating and trademarked subsidiary product component wholly owned by the license holder (see Tab A, fn. 1), by which you have now irrevocably agreed to abide by reading this word, not that one, but this one, hah! made you read it, has created the attached 'original work' ('original work') so as to create an wholly spurious but facially justiciable claim on all of the thoughts, words and feelings of the Dramatis Personae and any rights held by their heirs and assigns and you too. Alea iacta est. 

Operational Objectives: Emplaced tactical tangents will first create a verifiable cover as 'screenwriters' for an 'opera' titled 'Hunt-Liddy Special Project No. 1' through various 'underground' network dissemination channels and establish social and cultural  infrastructural oxyrhynchus where necessary to secure entrenchment. No ants will be stepped on. If cover is compromised, embedded operatives  will deploy Operation Beetle where they turn into beetles and crawl into an asphalt street to get squashed like bugs. If no large trucks come by, operatives will apply Operation Hydrofluoric Acid Facial Scrub and Sticking Your Head into a Giant Belt Sander Connected to a Blast Furnace Underneath a Nuclear Bomb so as not to compromise mission effectiveness. 

ACT ONE

Scene One opens with a brief mid 1960s Top Secret Comint message regarding Commie Infiltration of 4H clubs in Nebraska not fully unopposed to recreational bunny hangings.

Scene Two scopes out a bold and aggressive attack against enemies at home and abroad. 

Scene Three shifts to a dark cellar DC club in 1968 as MLK and RFK are offed but Blind Willie Johnson is found miraculously alive, with a pen knife.

Scene Four counts the number of footsteps travelled up and down back stairways by couriers to achieve approval of the Enemies List and its operational actuator, Hunt-Libby Special Project No. 1.

ACT TWO 

Scene Five contains the music offered by a pick-up band in a decrepit Homestead, Florida dive bar at closing where the properly skilled anti-Castro burglars were located and enticed by Hunt to execute Special Project No. 1.

Scene Six is the Cuban-styled song and video game going through the burglars' heads as they ransack Dr. Fielding's psychiatric office in Beverly Hills, CA to find his file on Daniel Ellsberg, who sent the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times.

Scene Seven depicts the same Cuban-American burglars, along with CREEP Security Officer James McCord, Jr., planting telephonic bugs in the Democratic National Committee Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel on Memorial Day weekend, 1972.

Scene Eight depicts the burglars' second entry into the Watergate to fix a faulty phone bug on June 17, 1972, getting busted by Watergate Hotel security officer Frank Wills, then getting hauled off, mug-shotted, finger-printed and having their 'pocket litter' examined, which included numerous $100 bills with consecutive serial numbers which the FBI traced to illegal, unreported campaign donations made to the CREEP. 

This is intermission time, so please feel free to go into the lobby, mix and mingle with other generous SeasonSubscribers and enjoy the complimentary white wine and deviled eggs. 

ACT THREE 

Scene Nine depicts Counsel to the President John W. Dean sitting in and stealing the show with Roger Miller at an invite-only CREEP event the night he realizes he is going to jail no matter what happens, so he might as well grab $4,850 in Hunt-Liddy hush money from his office safe to pay for his honeymoon and leave in its place a personal cheque.

Scene Ten is a rare binaural recording of CREEP chief of staff Jeb Stuart Magruder, feeling musically jealous of John Dean's boffo cameo with Roger Miller, whipping out some edgy home organ Samba riffs on the night he perjured himself to the Watergate Grand Jury. 

Scene Eleven depicts a disturbing hallucinogenic dream that Sen. Edward Gurney (R-FLA) keeps having where he is back in his birth state of Maine giving an incoherent 'JFK' styled stump speech at Carthage Town Hall during Congressional Recess where the 10 elderly Grange members in attendance keep looking like chickens without heads. 

Scene Twelve captures the musical mood when John J. Wilson, attorney for H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, calls U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii) "that little Jap" on the steps of Congress. Sen. Inouye has no right arm. He lost it in battle in Italy during World War II. Good times were had by all.

Scene Thirteen is [REDACTED FOR NATIONAL SECURITY REASONS PURSUANT TO 13 U.S.C. 315. et seq.]

Scene Fourteen is a wiretap obtained by the infamous 'double agent' from a now-legendary late night hootenany at John Mitchell's Manhattan apartment, where over numerous fifths of Dewar's, Mitchell rocks the mike Kingston Trio style at why Dean and Magruder need to stick to the plan, jail or no jail. A young and precocious Lee Atwater walks in halfway through the jam session with an ice bucket and his Gibson Flying V and lays down some 'hippy' guitar licks and goes all Steve Miller and Pharoah Sanders. Mitchell's third and fourth chins nod approvingly.

ACT FOUR

Scene Fourteen depicts U.S. Sen. Sam Ervin (D-NC) gavelling in and out the Senate Select Watergate Committee Hearings. 

Scene Fifteen is a previously undisclosed closing concert given by U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie to the Senate Select Watergate Committee where he brings out the Vinnie Vincent Invasion and the non-gay guy from Queensryche in an 'All Star Lite Metal Tribute to Roy Orbison and all those Other Old Fuckin' Rockin Dudes' to the Senate podium. During the tap bass solo, Sen Muskie forcefully argues for the President's signature on the U.S. Water Pollution Control Act Amendments of 1972, especially Section 401. He also seeks a Congressional Resolution where Geddy Lee is not allowed to say, 'Ladies and Gentlemen, the Professor on the Drums," anywhere in hearing distance of the international boundary of the U.S. and Canada along Lake Huron.

Scene Sixteen is a piano etude written by Hugo Black and performed by U.S. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger in memoriam to the recently deceased Chief Justice Earl Warren at the commencement of oral arguments in United States v. Nixon. 

Scene Seventeen is the Greek Chorus of the Ghosts of Ed White, Roger Chaffee and Gus Grissom discussing with Congress the importance of the future of space travel to the United States as they lie burning to death like baked potatoes in aluminum foil in the Apollo 1 space capsule at Cape Canaveral in a pure oxygen atmosphere while Liddy and Hunt and Colson decided the Real Enemy was Black U.S. Representative John Conyers (D-MI).

PRODUCTION NOTES:

The song "Truck Driver Divorce" (Scene 5) was written by Frank Zappa. The song "I Catch Myself Crying" (Scene 9) was written by Roger Miller. Fair use of these two songs is invoked since they are used herein as operatic and satiric vehicles to describe felonious crimes for which the culprits ultimately were convicted in federal court. Whether the real people involved in these felonious convictions actually sang these songs on karaoke night in Washington, D.C. in 1972-1973 has yet to be firmly established but might well could have happened.

Truck Driver Divorce -- The 1926 Version.

Here's a radically traditional 1926 version of a song by Frank Zappa that he and his band played quite a bit in their early 1980s tours. At the time, he allegedly described it as "a country song on PCP" that would cause the "death of country music." It did not surface in a recorded version until the 1984 double album, Them or Us.

Truck Driver Divorce -- 1926 Version.

In the late 1970s Zappa couldn't resist poking fun at country music, probably due to the ascendance of televangelists like Jerry Falwell and his waterboy, Ronald Reagan, who piously extolled the genre's celebration of enduring family values ... like ... umm ... cheating on your wife and being a useless drunk.

But Truck Driver Divorce is not a country song. It's really a mid 1920s Al Jolson kind of song ... on PCP. But then again, Al Jolson is like Al Jolson on PCP, so go figure.

And despite some enthusiasts' claims that this song is just Zappa's live band doing a loose, free improvisation behind a similarly free vocal improv, it is built on a standard 1920s-type descending I-IV blues progression using two major chords and their dominant seventh and minor, ie. I-I7-IV-IVm. In each second section, the I-IV resolves to the V. This is a scheme heard in countless ragtime and blues songs of the pre-1930s era and practically begs the singer to do the melody like Al Jolson, which is what Frank does, creating the appropriate level of cloying, obviously fake sentimentality the lyrical subject requires.

In the key of G, the basic chords are:

D7 (intro chord).
G -- G7 -- C -- Cm
G -- G7 -- C -- Cm -- A7 -- D7

While the vocal melody starts on the G, you need the D flatted seventh to set up the flavor of the song's tonality. This type of intro is a standard ragtime device, probably to get people in the room to notice the band is going to start playing a song. Blind Lemon Jefferson uses this kind of an intro in his 1926 song "Beggin' Back."

Note that all the seventh chords are not the major seventh but the dominant, ie. flatted seventh. So in G7, the seventh note is F natural, not F sharp, ie. G-B-D-F, which is what gives the progression a ragtimey feel.

Because this is supposed to be a country song, the G position on bass does not let you alternate down to a low D as the fifth which you really need to get that honky-tonk feel. Instead of detuning the low E bass string to D, I alternated the low G with the open D string. In the back end (4 bars) of each second section the bass really needs to walk through the chords on straight eighth notes instead of the rocking chair squeak kind of quarter notes at the front.

The final verse is different:

Cm - G - D7
Truck Driver divorce, it's very sad.

A7
Bust Your Ass

Cm
To deliver some string beans

A7
To deliver some string beans

D7
To Utah

G
Tonight.

Despite that Zappa's original live recording sort of sounds like a free improv, the composition is tightly structured and Zappa's vocal melody follows the I-IV progression closely, even though he and the bass player perversely flatten or double flatten a bunch of the notes. According to those who zealously research this arcane stuff, the instrumental back end of the recorded version is a spliced-in live performance of the song Zoot Allures from 1981 in New York City.

So anyways, if you have an acoustic guitar and can play open first position chords, you can play the 'real' arrangement of Truck Driver Divorce and exorcise your secret desire to be Al Jolson or Bessie Smith doing a really stupid country song about driving a truckload of string beans to Utah.

About the string beans. Zappa must have written these lyrics at the same time he wrote "No Not Now" from Ship Arriving Too Late To Save A Drowning Witch, since both songs contain a lot of the same phrases, like "transcontinental hobby horse" and "oh the wife ... oh the waitress ... oh the drive all night long," etc. And, of course, string beans to Utah, which apparently has some weird connection to Donny and Marie Osmond.

What I like about Truck Driver Divorce, aside from its sheer and unrelenting idiocy, is that the melody and chord progression are rooted in the 1900-1910s ragtime changes which by the 1920s became 'citified' by singers like Al Jolson, to the point where it's almost impossible to sing this song without subconsciously wanting to say, "Oh Mammy .... all the way home from Alabammie .... she used to cook me eggs and hammy ... Oh Mammy."

But the biggest challenge in recording the 1926 version of Truck Driver Divorce is that you can't sing the song straight because it's too flat-out stupid and songs in 1926 were never sung 'straight.' This is pre-method acting time. And I also didn't want to imitate Zappa's arrangement, since then what's the effing point?

After a lot of trial and error and messing around at 4 a.m. I started adding in all of the background noises, which consist of me pouring dirty bath water back and forth from a couple of plastic cat litter buckets and then kicking them over on the floor, shaking a bag of styrofoam packing peanuts, mumbling incoherently and imitating the voices of some weird people I know who talk like they have marbles in their mouth about shaving Brenda's crotch.

This fake audio verite approach is itself a direct rip-off of the Mothers' song "America Drinks and Goes Home" from Absolutely Free where Zappa creates a sound collage of a dive cocktail bar at closing time with Ray Collins saying 'last call for alcohol, drink it up folks' and offering them peanut butter and jelly and baloney sandwiches at their next gig while the patrons start throwing chairs and bottles at each other.

One problem with this recording approach is that it requires just the right mix of mayhem vs. music, which has a lot to do with mic placement and panning to enlarge the stereo spectrum so that you can still hear the song but the mayhem is right in your face. The production challenge is to take a completely studio recorded piece but make it sound like a single condenser mic at some weird PCP-laden hillbilly cabin in the woods.

The tail-out is me, Mark Kemezys, Jerry Trevino and Jeff Hursch doing some weird improv at 38-C Northern Ave with those 99 cent plastic slidey whistles.

Enjoy!

---

You can also do the song in C, which falls well on an open, first position guitar, and nicely on the bass, since you get to hit the C root on the 3rd fret, 2nd string and drop right to the G on the low E string. That progression is C-C7-F-Fm with D7 and G7 replacing A7 and D7 as the adds.

Actually, Lemon Jefferson was one of the only 1920s singers to 'drop' the theatrical pose and do a song straight, meaning sarcastically, in "Beggin' Back," where in the improvised verses he's goofing on the chorus of the song.

When kids used to go down to the Kennebec River to get Atlantic salmon for breakfast.

Citation: Boardman, Samuel L.: in Ninth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Maine Board of Agriculture. 1864. Augusta, Maine. Stevens & Sayward, Printers to the State. Subsequently published in the Maine Farmer, March 23, 1865.

At page 109:

"An aged woman, who formerly lived on the banks of the Kennebec in Vassalboro, and who, at that time, had a large family of children to support, once told me that, in spring and early summer, the fish from the river were a very essential aid to them -- that many times she has sent one of her boys down to the river early in the morning to catch a salmon for breakfast, with as much certainty that he would bring one home in season, as if she had sent him with the money to a city fish market, where she knew they were kept for sale."

How Maine's Sea-Run Fish were Dammed into Oblivion, 1864.

Citation: Boardman, Samuel L. 'Aquaeculture': in Ninth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Maine Board of Agriculture. 1864. Augusta, Maine. Stevens & Sayward, Printers to the State. Also pub. in Maine Farmer, March 23, 1865.

At p. 109-110:

"Everyone now knows that salmon, shad and alewives, and indeed all the other kinds of migratory fishes -- those that spend winters in the salt water, and come up out of the sea at certain periods, as if sent by a kind Providence, to spend the spring and summer in fresh water -- are now very scarce indeed, and in some streams totally extinct. Everyone knows, too, that many of the species of fishes which remain permanently in our fresh waters, have very much decreased in numbers, as well as in size and fatness. People say that this is a necessary consequence of the building of dams and mills, and filling the streams with obstructions of various kinds for the industrial pursuits of a civilized community. No doubt it is a consequence of these obstructions, but it not need be a necessary consequence. I hold that dams and mills might be constructed, and continued, and yet by a little concession on the part of dam and mill proprietors, and a more general diffusion of the knowledge of the natural history fishes, more intimate acquaintance with their peculiar habits, instincts, and wants of life, the mills might remain and the fish continue to perform their annual pilgrimage to and from their breeding haunts, if not in so great numbers as in former times, yet in such numbers as to afford a vast amount of provisions and even luxury to the communities which are now wholly deprived of them.

"I am also aware that this subject has been discussed over and over again -- that for years and years past, every session of our Legislature was thronged, and committees were worried and teased by mill owners on the one hand and fishermen on the other -- one demanding the privilege of building dams and mills without let or hindrance as to the fish, and the other pleading for some reserve, some fish-way, or some accommodation to the annual flow of the fish, which had been of such signal service to the support of the people on the banks and vicinity of the waters in question. I am also aware that our Legislators, actuated by a sincere desire to do justice to all parties, and to give equal rights to all, have, in most instance, made provisions in the several charters and private acts pertaining to mill owners, for the passage of fish at certain times and seasons, with a hope that, while it encouraged the establishment of mills and machinery, there would be also at the required times a safe and successful transit for the various species of fishes that required such passes as one of the indispensable requirements for the continuation of their existence. And we are all aware also that, either from ignorance of what habits of the fish demand, these ways have not always been properly constructed, or from selfishness in mill owners in not keeping them open at suitable times, these provisions in most cases failed, and the destruction of the fish is the inevitable result."

How Maine's Sea-Run Fish were Overfished to Oblivion

A few early to mid 1800s historic references I just came across illustrate how early and quickly the sea-run fish of Maine rivers were wiped out by over-fishing:

Citation: William Durkee Williamson. 1832. The History of the State of Maine. Vol. 1. Glazer, Masters & Co. Hallowell, Maine.

At p. 158, describing striped bass:

"The Bass is a large scale fish, variable in its size from 10 to 60 pounds. They are striped with black, have bright scales and horned backs, and are caught about the coasts. They ascend into the fresh water to cast their spawn, in May or June, being lean afterwards and fat in the autumn. In June 1807, there were taken at the mouth of the Kenduskeag, 7,000 of these fishes, which were of a large size -- a shoal, either pursued up the river by sharks, or ascended in prospect of their prey, or to cast their spawn."

Smelt at p. 160:

"They are caught in abundance, after March, in our rivers; 20 barrels of them have been taken at the mouth of the Kenduskeag at a sweep, and sometimes they are worth no more than half a dollar a bushel."

At footnote 3, same page: "On the 2d of May, 1794, at the mouth of the Kenduskeag (on the Penobscot) were taken at one draft 1,000 shad and 30 barrels of alewives."

----

Citation: Boardman, Samuel L. 'Aquaeculture': in Ninth Annual Report of the Secretary of the Maine Board of Agriculture. 1864. Augusta, Maine. Stevens & Sayward, Printers to the State. Also pub. in Maine Farmer, March 23, 1865.

At p. 117:

"Three years ago, in the month of May, in company with a friend, while passing by the lower lock of the Cumberland and Oxford Canal, in the city of Portland, our attention was drawn to the a crowd of men standing by the side of the lock, several of whom had long-handled nets, with which they were fishing, or rather dipping out fish from the water. On coming up, we saw that they were catching alewives in great numbers. It appeared that these fish, in their peregrinations along the coast, had been attracted by the fresh water of the canal, and instinctively entered it in order, as they supposed, to follow up to its source, (Sebago Lake,) but were brought to a standstill by the upper gate of the lock. The men engaged there then shut the lower gate, and commenced catching them. As soon as those of them that were confined in the lock were all caught, the men opened the lower gate again, and admitted a lot more of them, and thus a wholesale destruction of them went on. I supposed that some of them might possibly work their way up, when the several locks should be opened for the passage of boats, and thus Sebago made a breeding place for them, but on inquiry, am told that there are few or none seen there. Now it would be a very easy matter to stock that lake with young herrings (alewives) by proprietors of the canal forbidding any of them to be caught on certain days, and placing men along the route to let them go through the gates into the lake. Indeed, it seems that by renting the privilege of fishing for them on certain days, some considerable revenue might accrue to the company, while the production of the fish would again become a benefit to the section of country through with the canal passes. The same system might be adopted on many streams by having fish-ways or fish-locks, to aid their ascent, with much benefit to the country and no detriment to the mill interests."

_______

Citation: Twelfth Annual Report of the Maine Board of Agriculture, 1867. Stevens & Sayward, Printers to the State.

At page 90: "In Monmouth they [smelt] run into some very small rills that lead into Cochnewagon Pond, and are dipped out in considerable quantities. In May, 1867, after it was supposed they were all gone, a fresh run occurred, that yielded thirty barrels."

Sensitive Singer Songwriter by Douglas Watts

Here's a song I wrote.

Clay is Rusted Feldspar

My wife Lori asked me to explain to her pottery class in a fairly simple way what clay is, where it comes from, and how it got here. So here's an attempt at a non-technical explanation.

Clay is feldspar rusting. This is an analogy, but not that far from the actual process. We all know what happens if you buy a nice, shiny piece of cast iron from the hardware store and leave it outside in the sun and rain. It quickly rusts. If you leave it out long enough, it turns to almost all rust. So what is rust?

Rust is primarily the minerals limonite and goethite, created when iron combines with oxygen from the atmosphere and oxygen in water. We all know that iron things tend to rust faster when wet than when dry. Moisture hastens rusting.

Feldspar is not iron. Iron is one element, iron. Feldspar is a large family of minerals made from oxygen, silicon, aluminum, sodium, potassium and calcium. Feldspar does not form on the Earth's surface. It only forms miles beneath the Earth's surface, where solid rock is naturally in a semi-liquid, molasses-like state.

Feldspar is only released from its 'natural' home and to the Earth's surface either when it is forcibly ejected from a volcano as lava or when, after hundreds of millions of years, the 2-3 miles of solid rock above the feldspar is eroded away, leaving the feldspar nakedly exposed on the Earth's surface. This is usually in the form of granite, which is a rock made of feldspar and quartz and some mica.

To add another analogy, just like a piece of fine pottery on the edge of a shelf 'wants' to fall on the floor and smash, feldspar 'wants' to turn to clay when it is exposed to the Earth's surface. The agent for the pot on the shelf wanting to fall down and smash is gravity (in outer space, pottery does not break, it orbits). The agent for feldspar wanting to turn to clay is a bit more complex, but similar in design to iron rusting. In both, the agents are primarily air and water.

In the presence of air and water at the Earth's surface, the most natural and restive state for feldspar is to re-align its molecules into clay molecules. Clay is a mineral, just like quartz or feldspar. It has a very regular and ordered crystalline structure, like a diamond or a cube of salt. The three predominant clay minerals are kaolinite, illite and montmorillonite. With a scanning electron microscope you can get pictures of very nice, well formed, plate-like clay crystals growing right next to a crystal of feldspar.

Feldspar becomes clay by slowly bringing water into its crystal structure, like a sponge left in a puddle of water. This water becomes part of the very fabric of the feldspar; like how iron becomes part of your blood cells. The feldspar wants the water. It likes it. Which brings us back to rust.

What we call rust is the natural state of iron on the Earth's surface. Iron readily combines with oxygen to make rust. It wants to become rust. In fact, we have to do all kinds of crazy things to prevent iron from becoming rust. We coat it with oils, with paint (like Rust-Oleum) or galvanize it with zinc, all to keep the iron from contacting oxygen in the air and oxygen in water, sort of like teacher chaperones at a high school dance. Left to its own device, feldspar becomes clay because it wants to; that is its most stable and natural state on the Earth's surface. Like a thrown ball 'wants' to come back down, feldspar wants to become clay. Clay is rusted feldspar; and the actual chemical reactions are not that different.

In Maine, where I live, from 1880-1930 there was a flourishing industry where large feldspar deposits were quarried and mined for use as ceramic pottery glaze. This was feldspar that had not yet had time to weather into clay. It is still solid enough to make a house foundation. But if you crush into a fine enough powder, it works beautifully as a glaze ingredient. Most of the feldspar mined in Maine was shipped to pottery works in New Jersey as a basic glaze ingredient for everything from fine plateware to toilet bowls. It was an 'industrial mineral,' as the saying goes.

The only reason Maine does not have deposits of natural, 'primary' clay is because for the past million years Maine has been scoured by successive, mile high glaciers every 100,000 years or so, which like a steel plow on a snow-filled driveway, scraped away all the clay and softened rock right down to hard bedrock and dumped the residue in the Atlantic Ocean. In the U.S., you have to go south of the line of glaciers, ie. Kentucky or Tennessee, to find clay deposits still intact and near where they were first formed. What we in Maine call 'marine clay' is actually the finely ground-up residue from the glaciers' scraping and grinding that has partly altered into true clay minerals and is on its way to doing so, give another 10 million years. That said, it is still perfectly usable as a slip or a low-fire earthenware body. Be patient, Maine !!!

Ed Baum 1997 Graph

Fathers Day, Part I

Central Nebraska, 35,000 feet, 2 p.m., June 15, 2011.

---

Fathers Day

We live on stolen land
But what of it.
It was the Indians' land
So we told them to shove it.
Now they exist in our minds
Like little figurines
On the mantel or in
some magazine.

Some folks are surprised
when a fox is in their yard
Forgetting it was first
the foxes' yard.

Things you ignore
Don't go away.
Because you don't care
if they go or stay.

No country cheers
that it's number two.
The sky doesn't cry
because it's blue.
It can't have happened both ways
if we want it to.

A lie becomes true
if enough believe it.
A child stays pure
until you deceive it.

Then the kid starts asking why.
It's okay for you but
not for me to lie.

You'll learn son sometimes
It's what it takes
to get by.

The Great Goddards Ledge Rose Quartz Conspiracy Hoax

Philip Morrill et al. (1958) described Goddards Ledge near Rumford Center, Maine as a rose quartz locality, found while the pegmatite was worked for ceramic feldspar in the WWII era.

So in 1993 I tried to find it. It's a nasty traverse, pretty steep, up the side of a mountain, unmarked, no trails and 'intermittently' posted. But what the hell. Plus it's raining (keeps the black flies and mosquitoes down). Up and away we go.

Bonanza !!! I found an old feldspar working littered with giant shards of glass quartz way up the mountain, under lots of mud and leaves. This must be it. Light going fast in the rain. It's all rose quartz. Unbelievable! Nobody has been here for decades. It's all mine !!!

Get home at 10 p.m. totally soaked in mud, get up, go to work, next day take out all the 'finds' and cover the kitchen floor of the apartment with them. Yes !!! Sun comes out next day. All the 'rose quartz' is amazingly clear and devoid of any pink coloration.

My landlord, Yvon Doyon, comes by for the rent. The whole house and deck are covered with pieces of non-rosy quartz. We have to step around them as I write him the rent check. He gives me a quizzical look. It's a tenement. Lots of 'not-normal' people live here, and I get the feeling Yvon has officially put me in that category.

I've been hoodwinked. Shamboozled. Schlamottled. Diabolicized. It's all NON rose quartz !!! How could this be?

I think it was becuz I was a wee bit too 'eager,' or as Jim Mann would say, 'rock warped.'

Actually, a dozen or so of the pieces are true rose quartz. The rest are so faintly tinted it would have taken rose quartz tinted glasses to see it. And apparently I was wearing coke bottles of that stuff when I was at Goddards Ledge. Oops.

But it gets worse. Much worse. The next spring I brought my girlfriend to Goddards Ledge as the 'first stop' on a Memorial Day camping vacation; and we both climbed the 800 foot nasty incline up to the 'quarry.' But we didn't find it. I followed the wrong ravine. Since there are no trails, it's a bit complicated. And every mosquito and black fly in Oxford County had our number. So we ran back down the mountain to the car, totally sweaty, hungry, disgusted and bug-bitten.

Except I could not find the car keys. They were somewhere 'up there' on the mountain. I had put them in my backpack (for 'safe keeping') and forgot to zip the pocket shut. So they could be anywhere between us and the non-Goddards Ledge quarry. Under the leaves. In between two rocks. Anywhere. And it was getting dark. Smooth move, Doug.

So back up the mountain and about halfway up I saw a glint. The keys !!! Really? The keys !!!

They had fallen out of my pack when I was skidding up or down a glacial erratic. God must have had mercy on me that day.

So some of the rose quartz at Goddard's Ledge in Rumford is genuine, if you don't get too over enthusiastic. And when fashioned en cabochon it does display 6, 8 and 12-star asterism, as Phil Morrill said in 1958.

But keep an extra set of keys under the car wheel. Just in case.

Getting Lost at North Twin Mountain, Rumford, Maine

North Twin Mountain is just a few miles to the north of Black Mountain near the Rumford/Andover line in western Maine, south of Maine Route 120.

Swains Notch is a split in the mountain chain, marked by a pond, where Phillip Morrill et al. (1958) described large quartz crystals in the 'dirt.' North and South Twin Mountains are historically documented as having unmined beryl pegmatite deposits on their shoulders.

In 1998 on a very rainy June day I got antsy around the house and drove 50 miles to 'attack' Swains Notch and North Twin Mountains and force them to divulge their secrets. What a mistake.

First, it was pouring out. Intermittently, but still pouring 15 minutes of each hour.

Second, I had not even a good USGS map to direct me; just the old Phillip Morrill quads from the Winthrop Mineral Shop.

Third, I had no idea where I was going, except to the end of 'Swains Notch Road' off the road leading to the Black Mountain quarry.

But what the hey. So I got out, shouldered pack, hammer and went uphill. Uphill seemed a good direction to go.

After about an hour of steep climbing, in intermittent yet pouring rain, I did find some unmined, glacially scoured pegmatite outcrops on the southern shoulder of North Twin Mountain. And rough but large beryl crystals were exposed in the pegmatite, if you ripped giant carpets of moss off them and coated yourself in mud. But hey. Edmund Bailey did it at Black Mountain in 1880. But maybe not in the pouring rain.

So I've climbed 1,000 feet, am totally sweaty and totally soaking wet and it is pouring out, did see some in situ beryl but its getting toward 3 or so, not that I have a watch. It just seems 3 or so. Better get off the mountain. Start following logging roads.

But they seem to be heading in endless zigzags. There is no 'down'; just a down followed by an 'up.' Where am I? I have no clue.

On a clear day I could climb a tree and get my bearings from Black Mountain, or any high spot, I know the terrain and landmarks fairly well. But it's pouring and foggy. Visibility is about 300 feet and no sign of it lifting.

I'm totally soaked now, 4 layers of clothes, it's pouring and I'm watching a ruffed grouse who is not so worried as myself. I know from my mental map (no compass ! idiot) that if I walk off the east side of the mountain I will not hit a road for about 5 miles, the Isthmus Road and it will be long past dusk. But I also know that my car is only about 1.5 miles away at most -- if I walk in the right direction toward it. And I have no idea and the logging roads are all doing curlicues and cul de sacs.

But then, in a birch grove, near a brook, a breeze ... a smell ... coming from downhill ... badly cooked cabbage and clam flat gas! Rumford. The smell is my compass!

There was a while I was a bit scared because I had never been so thoroughly lost before. But like a monkey with a typewriter I randomly moved toward the door and downhill and took a correct turn and saw Swains Pond, which I had never seen before, but I knew it was the right way. And the rain started to let up. It was just kind of misty when I popped out of the road at the end of the pond and after another half hour found the car.

It's quite a beautiful place.

How not to solder a padlock in the woods at midnight

Since my one attempt at teenage vandalism did not come close to succeeding, I can tell the story.

When I was in eighth grade, the big chunk of woods behind our house was purchased and subdivided for development into what are now called McMansions. Because the land is quite ledgy and rocky with Dedham granodiorite, the first two operations consisted of cutting down most of the trees and then dynamiting the ledges and hauling the boulders off the shattered land.

This did not sit well with me, but as a 15-year-old with $10 in my savings account I was quite helpless to stop it. The developers had all their legal permits.

The dirt road to the development was quite a ways in the woods and blocked by large metal posts driven into the ground and secured with ametal chain and a padlock the size of a softball.

One day after school I decided to solder the keyhole of the padlock that held the chain in place across the dirt road. That way the trucks couldn't get in and cut and dynamite any more trees and ledges down.

This plan would take cunning and stealth and certain pieces of equipment: a Bernzomatic blow torch and a roll of solder from the cellar. It would also require sneaking out of the house at night after my mother went to bed. It would also require a Hogan's Heroes type of disguise, which in this case was all the dark stuff I had in my bureau and a navy blue ski mask, even though it was summer.

Fully equipped at about 11 p.m. I snuck out of the house with ski mask, matches, torch and solder and hiked through the woods to the construction site and tried to find my way down the little, circuitous deer paths I chose so as not to be seen beneath a street light. Once I got to the chain and lock I discovered I knew nothing about how to solder, particularly the part about heating the lock as well as the solder, and I didn't bring any flux. So the solder kept beading up and rolling off the padlock didn't plug up the keyhole, which my plan required.

After a couple minutes I heard voices and leaves rustling in the woods and froze in a cold sweat with visions of the fluorescent lights of the Easton Police Station and the inevitable call home to mom that I had been arrested, was in the pokey and needed bail money to get out. As the voices got closer, I panicked and bolted as fast as I could in the opposite direction: deeper into the woods toward Stoughton. I fell a few times, banged my knees and head on rocks and trees, scraped my face on saplings but just got up and tried to run even faster. I was scared but also astonished. How could I so easily get discovered and caught?

There were yells and screams of "Someone's up there in the woods," and it sounded like half a dozen people were following me. By their footfalls and voices I could tell were spreading out to cut off my routes of escape and trying to flank me from the sides to cut off any alternate routes. So I ran faster, zigzagged like a tailback and tried to throw them off my intended path, which I didn't know.

They were gaining on me. Who were they? Did the developer hire Green Beret squads to camp out and watch over their stuff at night just to catch people like me who didn't know how to solder?

Finally, like a deer in a deer drive, or a rabbit chased by a wolf pack, I zagged when I should have zigged and got cornered and tackled in the leaves and rocks. The man who knocked me down pinned me on the shoulders. He was much bigger than me. I couldn't wriggle away or see him. "I've got him," he yelled and the rest of the group converged. "What's this," one said grabbing my hand, "It's a blowtorch."

I still had the ski mask on. The group converged over me with clenched fists and wild screams about 'let's kill him.' At this point I thought my face would probably not have recognizable features within a few minutes and waited to hear what your own bones sound like when they crack on a warm mosquitoey night. I thought I was going to die.

"Pull his mask off," they yelled. The lead guy ripped the ski mask off my head. Then they all said in a puzzled voice: "Drugless?" It was my schoolmates. "What the hell are you doing out here?"

I told them my story and they told me theirs. I was trying to solder a padlock in the middle of the night. They had all taken LSD and had been running around in the woods high as kites since it got dark.

"We came this close to killing you, you idiot." They said.

So the soldering the padlock idea didn't work out.

The Frates Dairy Milk Bottle, Raynham, Mass.

This is a fairly recent picture of the Frates Dairy Milk Bottle on Route 138 in Raynham, Mass. The milk bottle was going to be torn down a few years ago but thankfully some folks decided not to.

As a kid, it made perfect sense to stop and get an ice cream cone at a 60 foot high milk bottle.

Thanks, Frates Dairy.

Some Background on our Maine Atlantic Salmon Lawsuit

Kennebec River Atlantic salmon, October 1996.

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The following (written in op/ed-ese) for the Waterville, Maine Morning Sentinel quickly scopes the salient issues:
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Breaking the Law is Different from Obeying the Law

By Douglas Watts
Augusta, Maine

Public documents going back 20 years show that hydroelectric dam owners on the Kennebec River have been aware that fish are sucked into their turbines and are killed and maimed. This happens because the intakes of the turbines are open and unscreened, like a window fan with no protective mesh.

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Atlantic salmon are killed at hydroelectric dams by the same mechanism as shown above for American eels.

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In June 2009 the few dozen remaining Atlantic salmon in the Kennebec were declared an endangered species under the U.S. Endangered Species Act. It is a federal crime to kill a Kennebec River Atlantic salmon. If you or I did it, we would go to jail.

Kennebec dam owners continue to leave their turbines open and unscreened and allow Atlantic salmon to swim through them, leading to their death.

Because these dam owners have failed to take prompt action to protect the few Atlantic salmon left in the Kennebec, myself and Friends of Merrymeeting Bay and Environment Maine are suing these dam owners in federal court to stop this killing.

Putting in the turbine screens will cost the dam owners a minuscule fraction of their annual profits. Turbine screening has been done now for half a decade at the Benton Falls Dam in Benton and the American Tissue Dam in Gardiner with no effect on their ability to generate electricity.

The Kennebec River is owned by us; not out-of-state dam owners. Using a public river for private gain is a privilege, not a right, and with it comes a responsibility to not interfere with our rights to the river and our right to expect that all laws will be obeyed and endangered species will not be harmed or killed or go extinct. This is why we pass laws.

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News item, Kennebec Journal, July 1880.