Dudes on the Dome

Lembert Dome, 08/23/09

Skeeter, Caveman and Chopper enjoying dusk

Mr. Peanut in the Sierras

In third grade I wrote a report about ants for my teacher, Ms. Heuttman. (In a future blog I will describe Ms. Huettman's hairdo). In my research I learned that the ant's body is divided into three different sections: the head, the thorax and the abdomen. On the report's cover I drew a picture of an ant over the words, "The Amazing Ant." The picture was really cool and showed a jaunty ant sporting a top hat and a cane. It seemed to be dancing:

"The Amazing Ant"

Anyway, since third grade I have acquired more ant knowledge. Some of my knowledge stemmed from the 1954 sci-fi flick, Them:

In Them, a colony of ants is exposed to nuclear radiation out in the desert. They mutate and grow huge, really huge. Even their pupae are huge and look like those big white propane tanks you see behind gas stations while driving up to Tahoe. The ants are the size of dump trucks and march around the desert sand waving their big pipe-cleaner antennas while making horrific screeching sounds:

This movie really scared me. I was only about five years old when my parents allowed me to watch it. The protagonist was a child named Jerry. In the movie's climactic scene, Jerry is shown running through a town's subterranean sewer system while being chased by some of the ants. I didn't sleep that night. I hid under my covers, worried I might be skewered by the pincers of a giant ant and carried off to the colony.

Years later, in July, 1980, we took a family backpacking trip to Granite Basin in Kings Canyon with our family friend, Betsy. Betsy was from South Carolina. One night Betsy woke up and startled us all out of our sleeping bags, hollering, "There's an ant in my ear! There's an ant in my ear!" With her southern accent she sounded like the maid from Gone with the Wind: "Ms. Scarlett! Ms. Scarlett! Ms. Scarlett!"

We tried to convince Betsy that there was not in an ant in her ear. It was just a hair, or wax, or the wind blowing through the trees. She persisted, but on the last day of our trip she reassured us that she was better. The ant had died, she said. When we returned home my dad took her to his office. He looked in her ear with his otoscope, and, much to everyone's surprise (except for Betsy's), he used some tweezers to extract the head, the thorax and the abdomen of a dead Sierran ant.

I wonder about Sierran ants. They are five times the size of regular, little black house ants. I have simply dubbed them "high altitude ants." Is it possible that ants grow bigger at higher altitudes? If so, could the Mt. Everest Base Camp have ants like there were in Them? This is precisely why I will never, ever visit the Mt. Everest Base Camp!

John Muir wondered about Sierran ants as well:

On my way to camp a few minutes ago, I passed a dead pine nearly ten feet in diameter. It has been enveloped in fire from top to bottom so that now it looks like a grand black pillar set up as a monument. In this noble shaft a colony of large jet-black ants have established themselves, laboriously cutting tunnels and cells through the wood, whether sound or decayed. The entire trunk seems to have been honeycombed, judging by the size of the talus of gnawed chips like sawdust piled up around its base. They are more intelligent-looking than their small, belligerent, strong-scented brethren, and have better manners, though quick to fight when required. Their towns are carved in fallen trunks as well as in those left standing, but never in sound, living trees or in the ground.

When you happen to sit down to rest or take notes near a colony, some wandering hunter is sure to find you and come cautiously forward to discover the nature of the intruder and what ought to be done. If you are not too near the town and keep perfectly still he may run across your feet a few times, over your legs and hands and face, up your trousers, as if taking your measure and getting comprehensive views, then go in peace without raising an alarm. If however a tempting spot is offered or some suspicious movement excites him, a bite follows, and such a bite! I fancy that a bear- or wolf-bite is not to be compared with it. A quick electric flame of pain flashes along the outraged nerves, and you discover for the first time how great is the capacity for sensation you are possessed of. A shriek, a grab for the animal, and a bewildered stare follow this bite of bites as one comes back to consciousness from sudden eclipse. Fortunately, if careful, one need not be bitten oftener than once or twice in a lifetime.

This wonderful electric ant is about three fourths of an inch long. Bears are fond of them, and tear and gnaw their home logs to pieces, and roughly devour the eggs, larvae, parent ants, and the rotten or sound wood of the cells, all in one spicy acid hash. The Digger Indians also are fond of the larvae and even of the perfect ants, so I have been told by old mountaineers. They bite off and reject the head, and eat the sickly acid body with keen relish. Thus are the poor biters bitten, like every other biter, big or little, in the world's great family.

Maximus Jeromeus

MAXIMUS JEROMEUS

on the shores of Lower Cathedral Lake, VIII/XVII/MMIX

"Hey Dad, tonight can we all, you know, just sit around, talk, and drink water?"

(asked by Max)

The Doodad

Yosemite's north boundary country boasts the Sawtooth Ridge, a serrated wonderland of supreme granite crackage. For the hiker trekking North to South, the ridge marks the beginning of the best of the Sierras. Before you stretches 200 miles of pristine rock, altitude, whiteness and blueness, and nonchalant marmots basking in the wind. You have arrived.

From the Sawtooth Ridge rise peaks and peaklets: Matterhorn Peak, Petite Capucin, Dragtooth (not "Dragontooth"), The Three Teeth: Middle, Northwest and Southeast Tooth (four out of five dentists have climbed each of these), The Sawblade, Cleaver Peak, Blacksmith Peak and last but not least, The Doodad.

The Doodad? There is actually a Sierran peak named The Doodad? Place Names of the High Sierras does not mention when or why this name was applied to this 25 foot granite cube perched precariously on the Sawtooth Ridge (see the nubbin of rock perched on the peak to the right):

Do you see it? That's it! That's the Doodad! On September 9th, 1996 I hiked with Turkey Tetrazzini Pete up Matterhorn Canyon and over Burro Pass and Mule Pass. I remember that trip, because on the way home I phoned Lydia from a payphone in Bridgeport on Hiway 395. She told me we were pregnant (Lydia and I, not Pete and I) with Sammy, our second child. That's what I remember about that trip. I don't remember seeing The Doodad.

Which begs the question, what is a doodad anyway? Webster says:

Pronunciation: \ˈdü-ˌdad\

Function: noun

Etymology: origin unknown

Date: 1888

1 : an ornamental attachment or decoration 2 : an often small article whose common name is unknown or forgotten

And from Roget's Thesauraus:

doodad: gismo, gizmo, gubbins, thingamabob, thingamajig, thingmabob,thingmajig, thingumabob,

thingumajig, thingummy, whatchamacallit, whatchamacallum,whatsis, widget, doohickey, doojigger, gimmick

The Doodad from 100 meters away:

The Doodad close-up:

The Doodad with climbers (These are not GI Joe Dolls perched on a little boulder):

I'm glad The Doodad actually wasn't called "The Thingamajig." Could you imagine the trip journal from a climber like Sir Edmund Hillary?

We pushed forward well past midnight, Tenzing Norgay and I, the wind howling like banshees and slapping our faces numb and the snow blinding us to our surroundings and all reality. Our exhaustion was total and devastating and our legs seemed fixed to the earth. Only with supreme effort and the breath of God could we budge them and inch forward. But then, out of the blizzard and the void which enveloped us, it appeared and stared us in the face...The Thingamajig.

Of The Miter and Muskrat Love

Miter Basin

Sequoia National Park

08/23/06

Mt. McAdie (center) 13,799'

The Miter (to the right)

Bishop's Miter

Close-up of The Miter

Always interesting, I think, how Sierran peaks are named. Sometimes the names actually describe the appearance of the peak. It's a kind of visual onomonopoeia. The Miter, as pictured here, is a wonderful example. Half Dome is a good example as well. (Could you imagine how undescriptive it would be if Half Dome were named Mt. McKinley?).

Other good examples include Table Mountain (looks like a table), The Thumb and The Hermit and The Doodad and Fin Dome (all solitary monoliths), The Sawtooth Range in Northern Yosemite (serrated), The Sphinx (you get the idea) and El Capitan (looks like a big, broad-shouldered captain standing guard over Yosemite Valley).

Speaking of "The Captain," we used to own this album growing up. You remember The Captain and Tennille? Those were unusual times. I had a big crush on Tennille (or is it "The Tennille"?), so I was not a big fan of the The Captain. He was my competition. It was never clear to me if they were married or just dating, or if they had their own families and just liked hanging out and playing music together. Also, what type of captain was he? He did wear a captain's hat. Where was his ship? Or where was his army? It was all very suspicious. As a 12 year old, I wanted these issues clarified.

I really dug the song, "Love will keep us together." That was the first line of the song, and the only line I understood. The other verses all got muddied together because of our lousy record player. I used to pretend Tennille was singing that song to me. We could survive anything, The Tennille and I, because we had love keeping us together. They also sang a duet called Muskrat Love in which you could hear a little creature like a rat twittering in the background. That must have been a novel idea in the 70s: let's hook a microphone up to a rodent and record it and work it into our song! I have no idea what Muskrat Love is (or who it is), but hey, it must have been something pretty special.

Some Assembly Required

Hannegan Peak

North Cascades National Park

08/25/05

In this picture my brother, Joe, is looking at a map in order to identify the peaks. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the summit of this sublime peak in the heart of the Cascades, we realized we did not have the correct map. Actually, we didn't have any map. We did, however, have the assembly instructions for the futon Joe had purchased several years ago at Ikea. Somehow those instructions had found their way into Joe's backpacking equipment, and he had mistakenly carried them along on this trip. So there stands Joe, examining assembly instructions for his already-assembled futon back home as the scenery unfolds before him. The nearby cairn* stands as a memorial to Joe's befuddlement.

*cairn 1) n. A mound of stones erected as a memorial or marker. [Middle English carne , from Scottish Gaelic carn , from Old Irish.] cairned cairned. 2) n. Astroturf

Betty in Yosemite

According to Betty Crocker, the ideal S'more consists of a marshmallow gently skewered by a two foot stick, preferably a stick pulled off the fallen branch of a Sugar Pine. The marshmallow is then patiently turned rotisserie style 8 inches above a blazing camp fire. When the marshmallow is slightly swollen and just starting to hiss and complain, and just a moment before it starts to ooze its gooey white center, it is done. It should be uniformly bronzed and subtly crisped, like the skin of my kids after a week at Tahoe.

By the way, when I was a kid, my family owned a Betty Crocker cookbook. The book was thick and dense, like Bible dense, and it would thud and startle everyone present when you dropped it on the kitchen counter. The book cover was checkered red and white like a picnic tablecloth. The margin of the book cover displayed a postage-stamp sized painted portrait of a middle-aged woman who looked like a homemaker. Was this a picture of Betty Crocker? Was Betty Crocker a real person? Interestingly, however, the woman in the picture looked like she had a moustache. You didn't even have to squint to see it; it was plainly a darkened area on the upper lip. Nothing wrong with a hirsute countenance, I suppose, especially if Betty were Mediterranean. To this day, though, I wonder if my older brother, Joe, had taken a pencil eraser and "erased" the moustache onto the picture. We used to deface a lot of perfectly good pictures in National Geographic and Time Magazine back then by giving people moustaches.

Betty Crocker through the decades:



Anyway, back to the perfect S'more. Only women like my wife and daughter are able to create the perfect S'more marshmallow. Insert a Y chromosome, however, and you have instant mayhem. Just observe my boys. The boys stab the marshmallow with a flimsy stick then shove it into the fire such that the hair on their knuckles are singed. The boys are precipitously close to tumbling headfirst into the hot coals. Once the marshmallow catches fire it is removed and held aloft Statue of Liberty style. Feeble and requisite attempts to extinguish the flaming marshmallow are made simply to appease Mom, but the flame persists. Bearing their torches, the delighted boys then run around the campsite like adolescent hyenas. It's all programmed in the primordial male brain, just like defacing perfectly good pictures with moustaches.


The flaming marshmallow shrivels on the stick and becomes a sugary briquet dripping it's sticky white innards down the length of the stick. In the end the boys flick the exhausted marshmallows into the fire, then, predictably, declare, "We need more marshmallows! Ours caught on fire."