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The Journal Project |
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A few months ago, during a random car trip, roaming through the back country of Contra Costa county, Rita Celestial points at a sign bearing the name 'Betancourt' and begins to fret. "Betancourt!" she says "that name is popping up everywhere! Betancourt! Betancourt! I can't get away from it." Or, something to that effect. It seemed to me, at the time, that the name was indeed familiar, but I couldn't figure out why. So I said nothing. As time when on, Betancourt came up a few more times. On street signs, pretentious housing developments, and so on. "Betancourt!" I would say, happy to show off that I had actually remembered something Rita Celestial had said. "Betancourt." She would say, with a healthy dose of disgust. After a while, I convinced myself that 'Betancourt' had never rung a bell, and it was only the repeated joke that made it significant in my mind. And yet the feeling still nagged at me. Fast forward to tonight. A cool, windy Saturday night in June. Shorn is enjoying some scotch and Planetside. I want to relax and play something--maybe Age of Mythology--but my mind is racing, and I'm just not in the mood to play. So, I organize my document folder. Yes, yes, I AM A DORK. I know. But I like to organize my document folder. After all, it's mostly stuff I've written, and we all know I am my biggest fan. Besides, I need a couple of writing samples to take to my JOB INTERVIEW on Wednesday, so I wanted to review some of my work. I spend some time moving files around, dumping them into the appropriate class folder, adding prefixes, etc. Every time I come across an essay, I dump a copy of it into my new 'Essay' folder, with the hopes that I will eventually pick out the best of the best of the best to show off to my potential employer. The truth is, however, that I am just playing around and reveling in my own literary fertility. I already know which essays I will take with me, because I know which ones are my favorite: my capstone paper on the population debate, and, of course, my beloved Packrat Midden essay. "Packrat middens?" you say. Yes. Packrat middens. Every once in a while a subject comes along that is so wonderfully offbeat and kinda gross that I can't help but become obsessed. (Recall the slimehag years of the late '90's.) Packrat middens had that same effect on me. Lesson time: Packrats are, of course rats. They are rats that live in the desert southwest, and have for thousands of years. Packrats make dens in caves and hoard food whenever they can. They stay loyal to a particular cave den for their entire lifetime, and even pass their dens down through generations. Within these dens, a trash midden accumulates. The contents of a midden can be considered to be an accurate representation of the vegetation immediately surrounding the den, because packrats never travel very far. Paleontologists use a combination of packrat midden excavation and carbon dating to determine what type of vegetation grew in a particular area at a particular time. This information can be used to show changes in plant distribution over time (particularly in pine species) and build a history of climate change. Cool, huh? But the best part is how the middens manage to get preserved in the first place. Most organic material disappears in desert conditions. The middens, however, stay in a kind of stasis, because the rats PEE on them! How cool is that? Under the desiccating influence of the desert, the pee crystallizes into a substance called amberat (heh, heh, amberat) which preserves the whole mess just like, well, amber. The packrat midden paper became significant for me for a number of reasons (besides the fact that I loved the word 'amberat'). It was the first serious paper I had to write upon returning to college after dropping out of SFSU a year earlier. It was for a professor I had come to respect and semi-idolize. A major part of my research involved slogging through this book, which is essentially a collection of 469 pages of scientific journal articles on fossilized rat piss. I finished, on time, only by locking myself in the spare bedroom for two days, ordering Shorn to ignore me until I finished my paper. And, after all that, I hand-delivered the paper to Scott at his office, and he looked at me proudly and explained that I was the only one of my classmates who had managed to make the due date. Everyone else in the class had called him and said their paper would be late. That was a defining moment for me. I got a crash course in the academic culture at CSUH, and permanently endeared myself to Scott. I simultaneously realized that I could get away with murder at CSUH, and that I had no desire to. I went on to ace most of my classes at CSUH, become Scott's T.A., win the respect of most of my professor, and make a couple enemies among my classmates. C'est la vie. It is for all of these reasons that I simply assume that the packrat midden paper will be part of any writing sample packet I put together. It also happens to be a pretty good paper, and one of the more 'hard scientific' ones I've written lately. I've been meaning to reread it, actually, to brush up on the particulars of the packrat midden subject. And so that's what I decide to do, as I'm organizing my essays on this chilly June evening. I open it up in Word, and begin to scroll through it, scanning. And I stop at this passage: Paleomiddens run the spectrum of composition from general loose plant debris, to nearly pure crystallized urine. Of special interest to researches are those middens comprised of a large collection of plant matter firmly cemented by the packrat’s crystallized urine, or amberat, as it is called. These formations can be sizable, and can represent many years of accumulation. (Betancourt, chap. 1) And I
couldn't help but laugh a little, because all this time the answer to the
mystery was hidden in the goddamned packrat middens! |
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