Wader woes

Waders can be a wonderful thing.  To some, they’re key to a good day of hunting and fishing.  For others, they complete an award-winning costume (meet your director, new Unis!).  And for those of us who insist on centering our Ph.D.s around marsh-breeding species, waders are one of the best inventions ever.  Field sites would be impenetrable without a pair of waterproof hip waders to get us through the day.  Only while wearing them can we brave the mud, the floating vegetation mats, and those horrible muskrat-made potholes to collect our precious data.

But sometimes, even the pluckiest of waders is defeated by the elements.  When the first sound you hear after exiting your car is not the sweet song of sparrows or the burry croak of blackbirds, but rather the steady WHOOSH of water exhaled by drainpipes, you know it will not be a good day for waders.  Your waders know this, too.  You buckle them on and imagine them peering up at you, asking uncertainly, “Do I matter anymore?”

Turns out, sometimes the answer is a big fat NOPE. Three days of rain and you might as well be wearing pajamas in the field.

Now you hear your waders yelling, “It’s a marsh!  It has no drainage!  It’s duckweed soup!”  But you have nests to check and birds to catch, and so you lumber in anyway, and despite your best efforts to hike up your outrageously high-waisted pants, you soon feel the shock of cold water running down your legs and pooling around your feet and the weight of it all pulling your waders lower and lower until equilibrium is reached and marsh muck gleefully sloshes around both sides of the fabric and your lower half becomes one with the marsh.  You’ve officially topped your waders.  It’s 7 in the morning.

Elephantiasis? Triple-jointedness? Simultaneous bow-legs and knock-knees?

Nah, just several pounds of water and all the interesting things floating inside it. Which we have been lugging around with us for the entire day.

One little-known benefit of wading in high water is that your clothes receive a dye job! Check out that hipster fringe on this mass-marketed shirt. It’s gone from plain white to dull gray AND taupe. Who says a three-dollar tee has to be boring?

To be fair, flooded waders are not so bad when the weather is nice. By afternoon, the water has usually warmed up enough that heading back to the road is no big deal. Your pants have been soaked for hours, right? (This is a poor way to get yourself out of a dry, toasty car at dawn.)

Note: You can see a few more photos here of what I’m actually doing in the marsh.  Hope everyone’s summers have been going well!

—Irene L.

Defining Service {lma}

Approximately 17 days ago, another DukeEngage student and I arrived at our volunteer site in a small village called California in Trinidad and Tobago. We learned that we would be working under the supervision of a retired female individual who, to my knowledge, is not affiliated with a government body, a nonprofit organization or any insitution connected to volunteer or service work. We have been completing the assignments she has assigned us in our homestay. In the span of approximately two weeks, we have finished approximately 8 interviews of community members she has arranged for us to speak with. To my knowledge, these interviews will be complied into a report that myself and another DukeEngage student will submit to her. It is unclear to me at this point who will read this report other than those affiliated with the DukeEngage program.

During our training for this project, in a three-day program known as DukeEngage academy, we were often asked to define “service.” Given the experiences of the past two weeks, if what we have been doing is to be called “service,” then I would define “service” as, “an arrangement by which one individual is utilized as a means to achieve the ends of another individual or individuals.”

To follow the experiences of the six students of this DukeEngage project, please visit http://devilsintrinidad.tumblr.com/. To follow my personal adventures and opinions, please visit http://lengagestrinidad.wordpress.com/.

violence in the district

This summer, I have the pleasure of interning as an investigator with a criminal law internship program, thanks to the summer enrichment fund. There’s never a dull day on the job here in the District of Columbia, where there’s no shortage of alleged murders, rapes and assaults to keep me occupied.

My blog, lconquersdc.blogpot.com, chronicles some of my experiences and many of my thought processes.

Uni love,

Lisa M.

Greetings from the Rocky Top Retreat

I open my eyes from a hazy sleep to see a spider above my head. It looks dangerous. It takes me a while to register what exactly is going on. I get a book, knock the thing from out of my tent and go back to sleep.

I awake forty five minutes later because the heat in my tent is unbearable. I crawl out of my tent, and walk barefoot to “the porch.” Roger, who’s accent is so thick I can barely understand him serves me an awful cup of coffee. I say “Roger, this stuff is so bad, it gives me the shits.” Roger’s reply: “Its good for you boy. Make you light and strong. You’ll climb better.”

No, im not somewhere fancy like New Zeland or Africa. I have been spending my last few weeks camping at Roger’s Rocky Top Retreat in Fayettville, WV. Its a simple place consisting of a field and a shack (pictured below.)

Rock climbers from all over the country come here every year to climb on the Nuttal sandstone that hangs high over the New River, ironically one of the oldest rivers in the world.

Tucked away in rural West Virginia, the New River Gorge is a little known haven for all who enjoy “human powered recreation.” Although the most popular activity is white water rafting (the New is considered one of the best white water rivers in the country), rock climbing, mountain biking and hiking are also very popular activities.

Some photos so far.

Hope everyone else is enjoying themselves,

Greg

New York City, #1

This is my last week in NYC! I wish I had posted on this blog earlier. Now I have to go back in my memory and recall all the AMAZING things that happened over the summer! When I got here in May I probably looked quite naïve. I didn’t know how to navigate the subway or how to find my way around New York neighborhoods. Now I pretty much know my way around Manhattan. Armed with my trusty map, I can find my way no matter where I am!

The key, however, is not to pull out your map, lest you look like a tourist. Tourists are abhorred in Manhattan and I’m starting to understand why. It’s nearly impossible to walk through the Times Square area without seeing huge groups of people standing around snapping photos. I mean, it’s to be expected – it is Times Square, after all – but sometimes you have to walk through Times Square to get where you need to go.

The things that usually impress people about NYC didn’t really impress me that much. We (myself and some other Duke in New Yorkers) went to Times Square our first night here, and I didn’t even know that it was Times Square! I was looking around like “where is it?” It just looked like downtown Chicago to me. What I think is cool about New York is that there are so many neighborhoods in so little space, that you can run into anybody anywhere, and that there are so many hidden treasures around every corner.

Example #1 of how you can run into anybody anywhere: three of us went to a (free!) comedy club called the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre. It stars Amy Poehler from Saturday Night Live, and the performance was great. I ran into a friend of a friend, a Duke alum, just standing in line waiting to get in. There are Dukies all over the world!

Example #2 of how you can run into anybody anywhere: On the first day (yup, the first day!) of my internship, I got the chance to go to a book release party where Steve Harvey, the famous comedian, was in attendance. I was really excited!

Examples of hidden treasures in NYC: AURA THAI. MANDOO BAR (not a real bar, it’s a Korean dumpling house). MEE. PINKBERRY. Please check out these restaurants if you ever come to NYC. They’re wonderful.

I’ve been able to do so many cool things this summer! Pizza in Brooklyn. Walking the Brooklyn Bridge (both ways, to Brooklyn and back!) Performing poetry at a street fair in Harlem (best memory of the summer). Going to a jazz club. Hanging out in Central Park. Going to tons of museums (the Met, the MoMA, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Museum of Natural History). And I haven’t even started to tell you about my internship and Duke in New York itself! Stay tuned.

Ikee G.

Greetings from the scrub

For the past six months I’ve been working as an avian ecology intern at a vibrant, wonderful biological station in (not so vibrant, wonderful) south-central Florida. In exactly one week I’ll be packing up all my stuff and driving a thousand miles home to prepare for a conference and, following that, the move to Durham. This timeline has been set since I accepted the position; the strange thing is that I now find myself thinking in circles whenever I consider the amount of time I’ve been here. On one hand, the tasks I was charged with completing in March and April and May seem like ancient history. Moreover, the level of familiarity I’ve achieved with the study site and 250+ Florida Scrub-Jays within it is a testament to the months I’ve spent in the field. On the other hand: Um, didn’t I just get here? Where did March and April and May go? It takes flipping through my journal and perusing several files of photos to convince myself that I was, in fact, alive and conscious for the past half year – not only that, but working 10 hours a day to track this population of bold, spunky birds during the entirety of their breeding season. Yet I truly struggle to accept the length of time I’ve been here.

I think a principal reason for that struggle – which is a shared sentiment, judging from the “Can you believe how fast it’s been?” exchanges with other interns – lies in the repetitiveness inherent in data collection and processing. It’s a singular mentality manifesting itself during each field job I’ve held; individual days are rendered meaningless as we conduct the same activities hour after hour to compile a massive amount of data. Then all of a sudden, a month or two or five are gone, and the sole proof of their passage is in the arbitrary list of dates written in our field books and official files.

For the majority of the season, my days revolved entirely around deciphering scrub-jay behavior to find and monitor nests, punctuated by population censuses and trapping of unbanded birds. Life was defined by nest searches, nest checks, chick ages and the absence of weekends (jays don’t have them, so why should we?). When nesting activity wound down in late May, we switched gears to working on our required independent projects, whereupon I conducted the same experiments for one month straight before embarking on number-crunching and writing. Up next week are furious draft revisions and Powerpoint creations, the final presentation on Thursday, and departure on Friday. And…scene. That’s it?

I’ve been dwelling on the time issue lately, because witnessing the speed with which my internship flew by makes me apprehensive that my 20s will be summed up in a box of field books and spreadsheets. (I blame this illustration for the “aaagh!” moment.) But even as I write this post, I know on some level my worries are unfounded, since anyone reading this blog probably doesn’t take his/her education too passively. The best assurance I have is my fortune to be specializing in one of the topics I most enjoy and to be doing so among the brightest academic community I could ask for. That, and when “work” is loosely defined as “testing behavioral hypotheses by playing games with birds (plus stopping to look at cool things along the way),” all those hours in the field are worth it. Go figure, I can actually earn a degree doing this!

–Irene L.

A male Florida Scrub-Jay (Aphelocoma coerulescens) perching on my ATV and being ridiculously tame.

Nineteen days old and ready to jump ship…

Thoughts about empire

In the introduction to Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico, author Laura Briggs goes on something of a tangent about the constitutional status of Puerto Rico vis-a-vis the United States. Mainland liberals, she writes, are often confused about why Puerto Ricans seem satisfied with free association, the colonial status they have currently. Liberals, she writes, imagine that Puerto Ricans should prefer either independence or statehood, and probably independence. Yet in multiple referendums (the freeness of which are highly debatable), voters have chosen the status quo. She posits that this is because Puerto Ricans understand the breadth of American Empire far more than Mainland citizens can. They understand, she says, that all people in the Western Hemisphere–indeed, around the world–are to some extent a part of the American Empire. As long as they are, Briggs’s Puerto Ricans figure, better to get the advantages of Free Association–citizenship, tax breaks favoring industrial development–than not. In other words, better to be colonized Puerto Rico, collecting on the obligations the Mainland U.S. takes on, than to be theoretically independent Mexico, still under American control but without any formal obligation.

Today on the blog I want to interrogate this idea using Canada as an example of a still different relationship with the United States. Two things got me thinking about this: the Conrad Black trial I mentioned in my earlier post, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s continuing trip to South America and the Caribbean. I’d be interested in other people’s thoughts on this from their own studies, experiences, and travels. Please comment on this entry or write your own!

More on Polaris

(Updated to include more articles and context.)

By the way, lest you think that only blog commenters are interested in the region of the Polaris nominees, look at the coverage in the National Post and the The Toronto Star, both based in Toronto, and both of which highlight the Montreal-centered list. Meanwhile, the StarPhoenix in Saskatoon simultaneously highlights the regionalism while trying to discount it.

That said, as this commentary from the CBC and this one from Toronto’s EyeWeekly shows, there are other criticisms too, starting with the uniformity of genre. And that’s true. Basically, this year is all indie rockers (although Julie Doiron is pretty folky), which comes in stark contrast to last year’s list, which included some hip-hop (K’naan and Cadence Weapon), some folk (Sarah Harmer), some mildly electronica-ish rock (Metric), and the challenging, arty, and terrific Final Fantasy (the final winner). (Last year’s list was also more geographically balanced and included Francophone act Malajube, which is often heralded as the first Francophone band to break out into Anglophone Canada.)

It’s probably worth pointing out that given the way Polaris works (a larger jury of music critics submit a list of five choices each, and then the top ten vote-getters are shortlisted) some of these complaints are merely sour grapes. The band I included in my top five didn’t get selected. This is probably made more so by the fact that the jury discusses while they’re making their top-five lists.

Greetings from the Explosion City

After a splendid, two-week vacation in China and some time recuperating from having a wisdom tooth extracted, I’m now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where I spend my says (six of them a week), in the Public Archives of Nova Scotia. I’m going through a sample of around 14,000 files about families that applied for aid after an enormous explosion in 1917. The explosion, which killed around 2000 people, was the largest human-caused explosion until Hiroshima (although that’s a rather silly thing to say, since “largest explosion” doesn’t actually have very much meaning).

A friend of mine–at the time, I was living in France and he in England–once described a theory of expat experience to me. He suggested that when Americans go to country that speaks a foreign language, they expect things to be different, and so their time there is spent becoming more and more aware of how much the same things are. In contrast, when Americans go abroad to Anglophone countries, they expect things to be roughly the same, and so they spend their time there discovering how different things are in each country. I’m not actually sure he’s right, but in any case, one of the things frequent or long-term American visitors to Canada have to think about is how and whether Canada is particularly different from the US. (Those of us who study Canada, of course, could be said to study this as our jobs.) Here are three pieces of news that Canadians are talking about that help describe the difference, or not, between the Canada and “the Republic to the South.”

Travels with Charlie

I recently returned to the city of my birth, Boston, Massachusetts.

In Boston, purchase of one CharlieCard allows one to reuse and recharge fares for using the MBTA, whose rail system is more commonly known at “the T.”

The card’s name harkens to a song called “The M.T.A. Song“, more commonly known as “Charlie on the M.T.A.”  The protagonist of the story, a man named Charlie, was unable to get off the train because he did not have enough money to pay the exit fare that was then part of the complicated M.T.A. fare system.  The song was based on the 1865 folk song, “The Ship that Never Returned,” and was part of Progressive Party candidate Walter O’Brien’s run for mayor of Boston in 1948.  As part of his platform, O’Brien sought reform of the M.T.A. fare system.  In 1959, the American folk group The Kingston Trio had a hit with the resurrection of the song.

My family frequently sung this song on road trips, especially after we moved to New Jersey and would return to visit my relatives in Boston. I always felt so sorry for poor Charlie, stuck underground forever. I felt like my existence almost paralleled his, stuck seemingly forever in the car on the long ride north. 

-Tori L.