Fundamental Jelly

I spent another week meandering the deserts of southern California in search of rare and elusive critters.  I had the good fortune this time to work with Moses—an old biological friend of mine and maybe the most interesting person I know.  He can hold forth on almost any subject and add meaningful insight without being a know-it-all.  To give you a small sample, we discussed, sometimes at great length, the following topics:  Angkor Wat, Ray Price, the subtle differences between Batesian and Mullerian mimicry, Darwin and Capt. FitzRoy, Jerry Garcia, Thai food, absinthe, population genetics, Raymond Chandler, the life history of fig wasps, Caesar and Vercingetorix, Marcel Proust, Franz Kline, gimlet recipes, and women.  Like I said, he’s a very intriguing person and who wouldn’t want to wander the wilderness with someone named Moses.

On our second night, we drove over to a little desert town to eat dinner.  We decided on Betty’s Pizza because the other eatery in town was closed.  We had a couple slices of serviceable pizza and a salad and as we were leaving the man that owned the place said, “You boys aren’t from around here.”  Yes, he honestly said this and if I am lying, may the prophet himself strike me down with all manner of personal grooming tools, including clippers and tweezers.  Anyway, we told him that we were not, in fact, from around here and told him what we were doing.  He looked at us stone-faced for a long time and finally said, “Want to buy a raffle ticket?”  We deferred and paid our bill.  When we got in the truck Moses said sarcastically, “So, how’d he know we weren’t from around here?”

“I’m guessing because we have full sets of teeth.”

The rest of the week we riffed off this question over and over.  At the end of a long, hot transect, one of us would say to the other, “How would they know?”  And the other would provide a funny answer.

“We speak in complete sentences.”

“We lack goiters.”

“We’re rash free.”

“The use of tools.”

“Opposable thumbs.”

“Our collective family trees have many branches.”

“We rarely throw feces at each other.”

On the last transect of the last day, we were climbing down a rather steep canyon into a wash.  I was standing in the wash at the bottom and Moses was still about 40 feet above me working his way down when a melon-sized rock came loose and starting careening down the canyon toward me.  Moses yelled, “Rock,” and I saw it in time to move, but as it neared the bottom it hit one last boulder and shot straight for my right leg and hit the inside of my calf and knocked me over.  I was wearing thick jeans, but it still managed to nip me pretty good (see photo below).  I limped to the truck and drive six hours to the house.  It was good to be home. 

We also came across these rock drawings (see below).  It is still unclear at this time whether anyone knows about these as yet, so we GPS’d the location and notified the land management authorities.  Maybe Moses and I will end up in the National Geographic…or not.  It’s still cool though.