Sibley: Newt Orgies and Other Natural Phenomenon

I've spent the last two hours showing apartments to perspective tenants; ie answering phone calls and standing around sort of awkwardly with my hair pulled back and hands idle while people imagine how their furniture, cat, pots and pans are all going to fit into this potentially new home. I've fielded a full array of questions about sound; "How does sound travel in the building, I mean do you think people will be able to hear me practicing my violin/piano/accordion/having sex." For the most part I can answer, No." "No, no one is going to here you playing your violin/piano/accordion or having screamingly loud sex while your bed post bangs into the wall for three minutes."  I'm sure for some this is not the answer they were hoping for. I'm sure for some they are hoping that the walls are paper thin: hoping that everyone in the building will know what an outrageously fabulous violinist/pianist/accordionist or lover they are. Exhibitionism is different when it is sound and not visual, but the voyeurism is the same be it an ear to a wall or an eye through a window.

I've been meaning to get up to Sibley since Thursday, when Thacher told me that the ponds were filled with frogs and salamanders and this is my first chance. I take off my shoes, toss some sandals on, knowing that if I don't I will probably be taking my shoes off any way to wade into water and this avoids me having to wait for my feet to dry so they can be re-socked and placed back in a boot. I also grab my old corduroy jacket, the camera and a big glass jar for specimens. I know that if I donï??t leave now I will be inundated with phone calls from folks that missed the open house and want to now stop by. Managers note: you usually do not want these people, because they tend to be disorganized and donï??t know how to prioritize, so not getting these people into look at the apartments makes your life doubly easy.

 

I take the 24 through the tunnel and go up Grizzly Peak to Sibley park. The ford comes to a rest in the first available spot and I pop out and immediately start a bee line for the Labyrinth Quarry on the backside of Sibley. The park itself centers around Round Top which is an old tipped over volcano of the east bay hills. Basalt can be found all around the area and was quarried at some point for gravel. There are also supposively geodes in the area (Berkeley Blues), but Iï??ve never come across one. My first experience with the park was as freshmen at Saint Maryï??s college. Allan Pollack my second semester English teacher had an assignment where we had to find the highest point on the western horizon from the school and write a paper on it. It was my first excuse to tramp around this great little jewel of the East Bay, which has since then become an integral part of my life by in relaxation and creativity (See poem ï??Resentment/Residual Erika,ï?? Ink on paper ï??thistle,ï?? etc.)

 

Grey mud dives and oozes between my toes as I cut around the north side of the peak. To the north I can see the old tunnel road that was once used for vehicle and buggies to access the now imploded inter-county tunnel, which sits a couple hundred feet above the current Caldicutt Tunnels. A high thin bank of clouds is fighting the sky for space, adding dramatic beams of light to the now visible body of the San Francisco bay. Struggles of this sort always hold a half promise of golden sunsets where the clouds turn colors that only the innards of the earth can compete with.

At the Labyrinth Quarry overlook a flood of sound resonate up, first one frog and then one hundred frogs and a few human voices mixed in like surrealist painting where the definitions are only definable by overt strokes that blur everything into one. Galloping down the trail I pass a few cottontail rabbits, so familiar with inert human interactions that they concentration is barely broken by my noisy feet and gently clinging glass jar.

 

By the main pond, the one north of the stone labyrinth that the severe rains have been less then kind to, two women stand pointing, ogling at things beneath the water surface. I approach and like the rabbits behind me they seem not to care of my presence until I am almost completely upon them. The water is remarkably clear with deep green foliage beneath the surface as if someone had just flooded a miniature garden and then planted giant cattails in the back. Upon all the chestnut sized stones are clumps of eggs and swimming above them rough skinned newts (Taricha granulose). Their bodies dark as night on top, but oranger than the brightest of citrus fruits on their bottom. They too pay no attention to me or the women lingering just feet above them with out stretched finger and laughing teeth.

 

Some how the situation gives birth to a conversation as six males wrestle dramatically in the water over an egg burdened female. The women relates to me how she brought her kids here with one of their friends from a super religiously conservative family and how the fist thing the kid said when she was dropping them off at the parents house was, ï??Mom, I got to see a whole bunch of newts today all having an orgy!ï?? Oh if looks could kill or at least send you directly to hell or some other unpleasant eternity. The woman confessed that she had mad a mistake by using the word ï??orgyï?? at some point to describe the breeding behavior, but what is done is done.

Highly conservative morality or religiosity is always pensive when confronted by the cornucopia of sexual functionality found in nature. The moral systems for the most part look at a very, very narrow slice of reproductive possibilities and are thus not able to expound themselves into such areas as asexual reproduction or multiple mate sexuality, which usually make the holder of such morals feel awkward when openly confronted by such things happening in nature. It just happens that single mate sex is probably one of the rarest things on the planet, so the chances for awkwardness are very, very high.

As I muck around in the two foot border of mud surround the pond a new couple shows up at its edge and ask me at first very reservedly if I know what it is that is breeding the pool. My naturalists instincts take over and I expound everything I know about the little creatures; their distribution up into Washington, the fact that they are one of the most poisonous creatures in this part of California, the multiple and sometimes genetically different (sister species) that utilize the same pond but at different times of the breeding season and the fact that some of these creature may be genetically hardwired to find this exact pond every season. In the midst of this little educational tirade I note to some of the parents around that they should make sure their children wash their hands after handling the rough skinned newts (their actually salamanders, but its really a matter of historical semantics), because the tetradotoxin (TTX) that they exude from their skin is the same stuff found in blue ringed octopus, puffer fish and thus Haitian Zombie potions.

TTX is a fun little toxin, in the right dose it completely shuts down your peripheral nervous system for about three days. You get to still hear everything that is going on, see a little and your heart beats just enough to keep you alive, but not enough that anyone would actually think you are alive. This type of catatonic state could explain why people that actually survive a zombie potion think they are dead and that the zombie master has brought them back to life. These people are usually catatonic enough for their burial to happen, which they get to witness first hand, and then are dug up by some guy that then brings you back to life in a couple days and claims he has risen them from the dead. The presence of TTX in so many organisms as a defense mechanism and its use in cultural shamanism has interesting implications when it comes to biblical stories like Lazarus or like Jesus.

The physician and his girlfriend ask if Iï??m a herpetologist and I refute that Iï??m just interested in whatï??s going on around me and that I work as a molecular biologist. Jim works at a clinic in the Fruitvale area and has a real passion for birds only in that I think he has a real passion for hearing the natural world around him. He had a very acute ability to pick out frogs from the reeds, insects and bird calls. We touched briefly upon recent ï??discoveriesï?? in genetics, such as all of that non-coding DNA actually does lots of things, really important things like the regulation of genes etc. Sensing a kind of akin interests we shared our favorites haunts of the bay area and get-aways. The sun fairly far down we stood in the deep shadow of the labyrinth and the wind starting to pick up we decided to go our opposite ways. They hiked up and out while I scrounged around the side of the pond to put my glass jar to use. I grabbed two clusters of eggs and some pond water full of daphnia and sealed the lid on my jar and stashed it back in my bag.

 

As I reached the ridge above the Quarry I heard my name called. Jim and his girlfriend had found the thrasher that they had come to Sibley to hear sing. We narrowed in on the robin sized bird sitting in a copse of tall poison oak stems, its elongated curved beak shaking out song after song. I had never seen a thrasher before this moment, but once aware of the bird I became aware of the other four that sing-songed back and forth to each other over the whole northen region of the park. Sense of a new thing is sometimes strange in that once one is consciously aware of something being their, the possibility of its being, almost seems to bring it into being, because one is ready to receive/perceive its presence.

 

The thrasher sang for minutes at a time, going through upwards of twelve different song types; everything from a scrub jay to something that sounded like a Tui. We marveled at how the bird would have come to have such a repertoire. How much of this is hard wired, how much of this is learned and is there any improvisation involved? Behind the silhouetted singer the sun began its final decent into the pacific, where the Farland islands sat just out from the Golden Gate.

 

The sun crashed down into the earthï??s horizon, kicking up the colors of the planetï??s innards: the yellows, golds, and orange shades of lava or the belly a simple rough skinned newt. The water vapor wisps of the clouds became things of weight, of heavy burnished brass and copper with sharp peaks that pierced the landscape and poked holes in the blue and black of the nightï??s impending cloak. To the east Mt. Diablo glowed as if all the green blades of grass had been traded for thin 20 watt darkroom bulbs. It glowed in a way that whispers to the wind and to the sea that summer is coming, no matter how full the sky is of clouds that turn like amphibian orgies, nor how pregnant the streams and ponds are, they shall all disappear, crack and open, go brown and blue with long days and warm nights.

 

The rough skinned newts will be hatching in a few days and in a few weeks they will be growing legs and heading out from the pond to find their new homes just in time for