Too long, didn't read

My mom got Facebook, and then half my lab friended me. Pretty much all I can say there is "Jane saw a really pretty flower today."

On bad days, when my job seems bent on giving me an ulcer (or predicating an immune response that weakens my stomach flora enough for Helicobacter pylori to establish itself) or making me drive off the road while looking for a place to camp after another 14 hour day, I figure that if nothing else, I'll leave this job with a fat stack of botany contacts. All I have to do is exert myself and be sociable- not normally my strong point, but after six days of seeking human interaction from gas station attendants, it's not too hard. Except... Except...

Hold on, let me consult with Señor C about googleability here.

Right. Pretty much my entire post is a bad idea in terms of google. Also, the first part of this post. Stupid internet. Editing.... editing...

So there's this older botanist I've been working with. He's... very lonely. He never stops talking. Ever. Climbing a 60% slope in the pouring rain? Great time to talk about your heart surgery. Surgeries. Sun going down, temperature dropping below the critical hypothermia point, everyone soaking wet? This is a great opportunity to discuss the validity of our sampling process! Driving out in the gathering dusk on roads that were perfectly safe eight hours ago- oh god, I'm going to give these roads their own paragraph.

So one characteristic of Southern California that creeps me out is all the creek fords. Northern California USFS will spend thirty-forty k turning a ford into a culvert- water across a road is a good sign that you should stop driving on that road. I guess when your creeks (sorry, arroyos) have a binary trickle-flood setting, culverts are either a serious impediment or damn useless. Still, I feel like a sediment spraying, soil compacting, Phytopthera vectoring evildoer every time I drive through shallow water. Of course, it's nothing to how I feel about driving through eight- EIGHT- creekbeds on the way to a site, watching storm clouds move in overhead- checking the other passengers and realizing that they are a man in his 70s with a heart condition and a woman who's been in the US for less than two weeks and used to do all her fieldwork from trains. (Oh my God, isn't that cool? Also, indicative of an insane infrastructure. It's like the kid from Finland who revealed that instead of studying what to plant after logging an area, they'd just consult the chart. Everything you needed to know about how to grow trees on every site had been reduced to a poster sized chart. Pffft, one thousand extra years of civilization.) I was trying to remember everything I could about flash flooding- but it seems my brain had cooked everything down to "Happens. Avoid."

Pause for breath.

Anyways, the arroyos were not any problem at all on the way out. All right, they were significantly deeper, and there was a brief moment when I thought I'd cracked my oilpan- but that sort of paled in comparison to the roads themselves. The roads that look out over beautiful vistas- vistas that seem to involve long steel slopes without any of those comforting trees we get up north. Those "couldn't crash through more than fifty feet of forest anyways" trees. If you're going 15 miles an hour when you crash, someone should be uninjured enough to hike to cell phone reception. The roads themselves are made from ancient slippery adobe clay- just waiting for a little bit of rain so that the top quarter inch soak up enough water to be as slick as ice- a layer that sits on top of the dry powdery soil below and... it's slippery. Ball bearings slippery. Dress shoes on icy pavement slippery. And droning on and on is a discussion of botanical filk musics. I don't think I went faster than seven miles an hour the whole time.

A couple of times we fishtailed badly, my life flashed in front of my eyes, I'd swear miserably under my breath, and then tell my passengers that I'd been distracted for a moment. Please, do go on telling me about that funny parody of the M.A.S.H. song as it pertains to botany.

C and I have an arrangement- I'll call him before eight or he gets to call the National Guard. As we crawled out of this site, I was both slow motion racing against the clock and thanking my lucky stars that someone would look for us. C- being awesome when everything else is not.

Oh, what's that? You want me to concentrate on the South and let the other guy concentrate on the North? Not just no. Not just hell no. I don't really know how to express how much of a no I mean.