A Living Magazine - Prologue 2 - Finding the Fauna and Flora

This post might be a bit dry for many folks looking for an adventure here each day. I apologize for that. I thought intensively about the following paragraphs referring to nature, and so it seemed like the obvious choice of subject for today.

I went back to the same place to sleep last night (please see the yesterday's post). It was much drier. I mentioned yesterday that I hadn't seen any insects the night before. Well, I ended up transporting two small black beetles (I named George and Ringo) yesterday morning to Livermorium Plaza, where I drank my coffee and wrote some of yesterday's post.

One fell off the bottom of my backpack and the other one was crawling up the inside of my pant leg. He was fine when I shook him out. They slowly moved to the same sidewalk crack and disappeared together. I hope a gang of city roaches doesn't get hold of these country bumpkin beetles. But, if so, such are the ways of nature. I was stepping over some very large cockroaches when I was returning from being in town. Must be the season?

When I got to the sleeping spot last night I checked all around for bugs. There was nothing. However I noticed under the flashlight that there were small holes in the ground all around the area. I poked and prodded at them, but discovered more of nothing.

After I passed west into New Mexico around the first of the year the animal populations really thinned out. Arizona too, was strangely missing animals except for a few wild boars in Sedona, I saw no animal larger than a squirrel. The populated parts of Northern California do have significantly more wildlife than those other two states, but I would say that New England and the East Coast in general have perhaps a whole magnitude more than California.

I don't mean to sound obsessed with critters, but carefully observing the way that animals and plants of all kinds behave or grow in certain environments can be pretty helpful if one is rough camping. I lay awake thinking about all of the natural life I see and experience every day.

Different living things are found surviving together in all parts of the country. Mushrooms - especially amanitas - and pine or birch roots mutually benefit each other, for example, no matter what state they are found in.

Here in Northern California is the gathering of most of the rest of the country's plant species--though these species have developed new varieties to adapt to the Mediterranean-like climate. There are maple trees that look just like New England's, except that instead of a five bladed leaf, the central blade is missing. There are bushes that have exactly the same tiny flowers as lilacs might--they even smell very similar, but their fast-growing stems are soft and green, not woody like a lilac's branches (I still have yet to find what this California plant is called).

Because the seasons are somewhat blended into one kind of fairly reliable climate all year, bushes can actually bulk up and turn into trees. And, the trees keep their bush-like ability to produce flowers--as in the case of magnolias. The deciduous magnolias I'm used to back east lose their leaves in the winter months, then flower and produce new leaves once the flowers run their course in the spring. Like New England, California has those. But the broad leaf evergreen magnolia trees like this one...

Photos.com Getty Images of a

Broad Leaf Evergreen Magnolia (Magnolia grandiflora)

...can only survive in warmer climates. The Pacific is a warmer ocean than the Atlantic, and the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range mostly keeps this warmer, rain producing west coast air from passing eastward into Nevada and the other Southwest states. Because of this Pacific effect, these warm climate evergreens can grow, even as far north as the west cost of southern Canada.

At my sleeping spot there are grasses that look rather benign but hide very sharp seeds. The husk-seed combination fall or are carried off - in my shoe, for example - and then the husk is ground away easily exposing the sharp, microscopically barbed seed. It sticks in clothing and is difficult to pull out.

I felt them on the inside of my shoe when I first visited the sleeping spot about a week ago, and took the shoe off, feeling around the inner toe area but finding nothing, I put the shoes back on and got a prick. I discovered that these seeds (with their backward pointing hair-like barbs) are one way travelers. The go into clothing quite easily, but won't be pulled out easily.

David Sixsmith told me that there is another kind of grass called a foxtail...

Wikipedia Image of a Foxtail (Horeum murinum)

...and this harmless looking plant also has sharp seeds and a similar but even more sinister and disturbing habit of working their way into the soft tissues of dogs and other animals. They can enter anywhere but are most likely to get into thin skin and mucus membrane tissues of mouths, noses, eyes, ears, skin and even genitals. The seed is super tough and can't be broken down by the body. Thankfully for east coast people these plants are mostly found in the western United States.

But this is serious stuff. The embedding of these seeds can kill an animal if it isn't recognized and remains untreated. While walking Racer (David and Sheryl's dog), who eats grass sometimes and always has his nose to the ground, I had to remain vigilant about steering him away from this kind of grass. Some lawns were entirely covered by it.

It is interesting to relate, when I was doing the research for this post, just how profoundly ignorant many people were about the natural world. At Yahoo Answers, folks were asking questions like, "Are spiders animals?"

To make a careful analysis of the natural things around us is a good habit to form. I watched how bees of a species tend to stick together while gathering pollen...

Today I watched three distinct species of bees working on the same patch of lavender and purple sage plants. The species' would bee (sorry, I had to!) in very close proximity to each other - even in the same flower together - but would not interact in any way. Yet, members of the same species would occasionally touch antennas. Is this practical information? Who knows? I've found it to be a way of telling bee species apart by their behavior when they look too similar to distinguish by sight.

Now, on a completely different subject...

At about 10:00 pm, I had the sudden urge to do some writing offline. I reached into the backpack and retrieved my Nextbook. I looked at it folded up from the outside and saw that there was a thin strip of light shining out from around the edge. When I opened the lid, there was a back-lit, blank grey screen. I could not turn off the unit, which is also sealed shut with no access to the battery.

My heart sank. I had lost the box it came in but I still had the receipt. Walmart has a very lenient return policy, but I had spent a lot of time downloading the programs I use and wanted to avoid the whole return thing if possible. Plus, there were current files that were not backed up.

I knew I would have a feeling of dread in the morning. Everything had been going pretty smoothly with the preliminary planning for this journey, and now this!

When I woke up this morning I checked out the Nextbook again and it was stone cold dead. I sighed, packed everything up and headed up the path to S. Livermore Ave. Then, I walked downtown to get a coffee.

Another neat thing about Livermore is that many of the street lamps have power sockets facing the sidewalk at their bases, without panels covering them. I have no idea whether the city does this as a service or whether people have broken off the covers and the city just never got around to fixing them? Whatever the case, I found one of these outlets and plugged in the Nextbook. I let it charge for a good half hour without trying to turn it on.

I crossed my fingers and dotted my eyes, or something like that, opened the lid and clicked the power button. A blue "Updating" screen appeared, with the numbers ticking up slowly to 100%. If I was lucky, apparently, the unit would simply finish doing an auto-update, restart and be fine. And that is exactly what happened. I'm glad I didn't try to pry the back off or something. I guess (and please let me know if you've had a similar issue) the Nextbook began updating soon after I left the library last night--turning itself on to do so. Because there is a safety feature disallowing it to turn off while updating (I guess?), and because it wasn't plugged in, it got stuck at some point and was unable to complete the updates, but remained on. That is my hypothesis anyway. I'd love some expert musings from any tech people out there.

I seem to have both good and bad fortune when it comes to computers. They often die, but in nearly every case in the last two years, I've been able to save them. The wonderful thing about this tablet is that it is entirely solid state (no moving parts--like HDDs). That makes it tougher and longer lasting. Let's hope it can survive a continental crossing as well as my big Toshiba did! See you tomorrow!