Wild Archival - Day 31

After a straight week of warm, dry weather, the skies opened up thirty minutes ago and pelted rain down on us hard enough that it sounded like the timbers were cracking.It all ended as quickly as it began, and now I'm sitting comfy in bed, enjoying the cool air the little storm brought with it and trying to get my thoughts in line.

This week has been a particularly eventful one, and it's hard to figure out where to begin. There was the last few days, which I spent meeting a number of very interesting people and discovering a number of very interesting things, and then there was yesterday, which I spent driving a loop around Yellowstone National Park.

I'm going to try to be concise here, but I don't think it'll happen.

So Monday I happened to run into a gentleman at the Center whom Steve introduced to me as Harvey Locke, and his wife Marie. I think her full name was Mariezef, but I'm not quite sure about that. They were French Canadians, come down to give a talk at the visitor's center, which Harvey invited me down to see.

It was an excuse to stay out of the studio, which has been hard to stay lurking in since the weather has improved, so I made the trek down and watched. Apparently this Harvey Locke is a forerunner of Canadian conservation and a major spokesperson for the Yellowstone the Yukon initiative, which was the group that had the Murie Center's artist in residence Dwayne Harty paint some of the most remote areas of the Canadian West.

So there was that connection. Anyway, the Lockes turned out to be hands down wonderful people. They invited me to join them at a dinner gathering at the center, and I ended up spending the evening chatting with ten or so people about every little thing but mostly conservation and Jackson, was eaten raw by mosquitoes and had some of the most delicious fruit salad ever. There was mint in it.

After dinner we retreated to the camp fire and continued our conversation, which had drifted to the cultural differences between Canada and the US in terms of guns. By twilight there were only a few of us left, still chatting away and roasting a few marshmallows I had pilfered from the back. At one point a moose and her calf stepped out of the forest line. All we could really see was their silhouettes down the path, but they were quite close. By the end it was just me and Dirk, kicking around embers and listening to the moose bugling out in the distance. At one point we heard an owl too.

Dirk is an awesome guy. Everyone here is awesome, but Dirk is like Minnesota's answer to Steve Irwin. He has such genuine enthusiasm for absolutely everything, and when he talks about all the random critters we come across out here it's not hard to believe that those experiences are the best anyone could ever have. He ended up telling me that night that the strange sounds I had heard a while back ago were most likely coyotes.

About two weeks ago I was lying in bed, getting to sleep, when I hear what sounded like hyenas yipping somewhere close by. The sounds kept getting closer and closer, and lasted for a good 15 minutes, until I was pretty sure they were somewhere right on the property. It's pitch black outside. There is no light, so opening a window would have done no good in identifying the sound. Besides, I didn't want to draw attention to myself. Then, when we were at the fire this Monday dirk was talking about coyotes coming so close to his cabin he would have stepped on them if he had gone out. He assured me that they were harmless, but all the same I think I will try to keep a wall between us if they do come by again.

Then, for the rest of the weeks I was doing the fun work of organizing the messiest cabinets in the archive. I had been pampered with how well done everything else in the collection was, but there were a few drawers that were little more than piles of paper dumped in with the barest of labeling and no organization whatsoever, so there was a lot of rearranging, and relabeling, and organizing things back and forth until something that looked like sanity appeared.

I did find some neat stuff along the way.

This was in with a drawer full of awards and metals. I found it interesting for two features.

The mush detail at the top...

And the tag on the inside. According to this the badge was made in Newark, and the interesting historical detail is in the list of unions on the tag. That's something I've never seen before, though I suppose the more I work with material from this era the more it might come up.

And here was the second cool find. Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter, by Theodore Roosevelt.

Limited edition, 164 of two hundred, signed by the author. Now, in the world of rare books this is not actually a huge deal. But the guys at work got a kick out of it and you have to admit, it's not many people who have gotten to flip through a book signed by Teddy.

Here's an illustration from the book I found particularly amusing. Cook vs. Bear.

Now that the inventory is pretty much done, the time for playing with materials has passed. Most of the work I'm doing this month will be writing up procedure, starting grant work, and making a report with suggestions on how to proceed from here.

And then, some quick tidbits:
There is a family of bats in the roof of Mardy's porch. Every time I step outside in the evening I can hear them screeching away, but luckily the door is enough to keep that sound out. I haven't seen them yet but I'm keeping my eyes peeled.

Apparently mosquitoes have a period of extreme activity, which is sometime from the beginning of evening until nighttime. Considering how long that window of time is right now, it's a slaughterhouse.

I keep remembering to mention something here and then forgetting when I go to put it down.

Since this post is already long, I'll put Yellowstone in another one.