MAY-B-7
MAY DAYS IN MARYLAND—AT LEAST A FEW OF THIS WEEK—
BEFORE TAKING OFF ON A BRONCO ROAD TRIP
TO CELEBRATE THE RITES OF SPRING IN SITTING IN THE MOUNTAIN WOODS AT DAWN
AND TALKING TURKEY—WITH GUIDE CHRISTIAN ELWELL, IN ITHACA, NEW YORK
MAY 12—20, 2001
This is a week of graduations. There were many of them close by—such as that for GW and the medical school, but I had several places I should b e gong to between now and the trip to Steamboat Springs Colorado at the end of the month, involving my picking up trophies, rather than the diplomas that I, too, should have had by now in the latest (and last?) degree program in my epic struggle. But, I elected to go to New York and visit a campus I have never been on before in a very interesting place—that is, Ithaca, New York and Cornell University and the Finger Lakes of Upstate New York. What occasioned this visit was the email messages Christian Elwell and I exchanged about his brain turning to cream cheese with his last tests and papers submitted for his Masters in Plant Sciences at Cornell, a program we had discussed at length in a tent in the rain in Talkeetna Alaska, where we went about the praise of the academic life instead of going up the nearest mountain the thick cloud cover and collecting the Dall Sheep two years earlier than we eventually did into the Brooks Range. And next week Christian picks up his degree from Cornell, just after I go up to Martinsburg Pennsylvania where guide and client from the two Alaska sheep hunts rendezvous at Zimmerman Taxidermy where I will be collecting my Dall Trophy from the master sheep taxidermist.
I have arranged to be picking up George Sevich in Fort Detrick in Frederick Maryland, and carrying him as my Asian hunting outfitter, so that he will be able to meet both the master taxidermist Marcus Zimmerman as well as the master sheep guide Christian Elwell, so we will have this rendezvous in the second road trip of the same Bronco megamiles in the same week, before I set my course for a third trip South to visit Craig Schaefer, regarding his new settling into South Carolina, and possibly George Poehlman in North Carolina regarding Malawi plans and the pick up another trophy that is ready for me there near Fort Bragg, North Carolina—the plug ugly Russian boar hog I got on Cumberland Island last year. So, the as-yet-nonexistent trophy room is filling up fast, now represented by basement floor space.
I have tried to get some from of outline of a thesis proposal to my committee before they disbanded to different compass points almost as far as I will be shortly, but they have all dispersed, and I will have to have this process continued still further. I have some further revisions and electronic formatting of the book chapters in several books written from six to two years ago now getting the pre-printing work done on the---Surgical Endocrinology, at last, and the Surgery and Healing in the Developing World. I also went to the gross anatomy lab for the first time since I was a freshman medical student, and looked for a nasty little muscle enveloping the sciatic nerve called the pyriformis and took pictures of it in its anomalous pattern of association with this major nerve, both for a presentation on the Pyriformis Muscle Syndrome and also for a very non-academic interest I have in this annoying rascal.
I developed whammy Mom always had once each spring, a severe case of laryngitis, which rendered her unable to talk, and not even whisper very well. I had that coming on during this week, and could do little except such chores as get the Bronco washed and waxed—looking good is a substitute for replacing it, which I even considered by driving the new Ford Escape Small SUJV, in a class called the “Cute ‘Ute”. By the time I came home by way of my barber Carl Dees on Thursday, it was already raining (it does that within the hour that the vehicle is shiny and bright as new) and I was unable to talk above a whisper. It was then that Christian called and I figured if I couldn’t talk, what better time or place to be sitting than in the springtime turkey woods? One is not supposed to talk or move much, and wait while a slate, or box call or mouth diaphragm does the talking—so, I did. The drive is about 375 miles, which the Bronco did very well—thanks to a load of Books on Tape—one of which I would recommend highly, especially to Tom and Sheri, “Cooper Creek” the story of the early exploration expeditions into the interior of Australia.
CRIS is at 42* 26. 07 N, and 76* 23. 25 W. This makes it 232 miles from HOME on bearing 202* Or, in case you were wondering, it is 6,822 miles from (Cape) HORN at 187*, or 4,814 miles from HLUH (Honolulu) on bearing 293*, or 7,018 miles from the GOVT (Guest House in Dharamsala, which I had recently left) at 35*--another bearing that directs you along the shortest route which, in this case, is just east of the North Pole “over the top.”
I saw the beautiful setting of the Cornell campus, which I rode to on the back of Christian’s motorbike, with the land grant quadrangle situated on the deepest of the glacial gouged Finger Lakes, Lake Cayuga. I also heard a couple of uncooperative gobblers talk to us in the early morning right after the wood thrushes had filled the air with the dawn sounds I would have taped, except that it did not make sense for me to carry a tape recorder when I could not speak at all to narrate any part of it for context. We saw deer galore, and roasted up a few venison steaks over apple tree kindling—a second product from the local orchards that Christian is using as a byproduct, the other being 55 gallon barrels of fermenting cider. We showed pictures and told stories of past and future hunts, and arranged our gathering—once again—over the magnificent Dall ram, even though this time on Tuesday we will not ha the magnificent backdrop of the snow capped Brooks Range as our [principle focus around the centerpiece Trophy Ram as the master of the peaks of the Top of the World. When I get Christian and George Sevich together on Tuesday at Marcus Zimmerman, we will have amalgamated quite a vast venue of hunting sites and experience with a wide variety of big game.
We explored the spring woods and swamps—we were, once again, in a steady snowstorm of large fluffy falling flakes, as we each have pictures of the other on the several times in the Talkeetna and the Brooks Range we were seen with the large white stuff in the air all around us---but, this time it was a cottonwood blizzard of steady white fallout.
We fished in a farm pond introduced to us by an avid bowhunter named Merrit, who is the official SCI scoring measurer for Pope and Young (bowhunting trophies) and Boone and Crockett (gun trophies) and had just returned from doing measurements in a Pennsylvania taxidermist—just as Christian and I are preparing to go down to collect mine. We caught dozens of small bullheads, until we could no longer see enough in the darkening night to unhook them and throw them back.
We took advantage of a spectacular place here possibly even better than the Flume in the Whit Mountains State Park in New Hampshire I had walked thorough with a baby named Donald passing small saplings, that on my next visit, thirty years later two years ago, were now the grand masters of the New Hampshire State Forest around the Flume, a series of spectacular waterfalls near the Old Man of the Mountains (the Great Stone Face) emblem of New Hampshire. While New England has built up a large park and charges expensive fees to get in to see it, here in the Finger Lakes area, and particularly around Lake Cayuga, the glaciated country of spectacular gorges, there are almost a dozen such gorges running toward Lake Cayuga.
We walked the trails around and through a very spectacular “glen” at the Robert Treman State Park, a free access and very wonderful natural history site in one such gorge. There is one waterfall called Lucifer, which is 115 feet of cascades over limestone and sedimentary rock shelves that seem almost cut at rig angles for the pretty effect—with Columbine and Trillium growing around the ferns and mosses along the damp hollow of the banks along the Glen. I posed near what has to be a sign that will become one of my favorites: “Do not throw or kick stones into Glen!”
So, if no one throws or kicks stones into me, I will surely return, at least in the fall when I can help hang a few more deer in the barn!