Speaker 1: What's going on? Welcome to another episode of The Crime
Payers of Botany Doesn't Podcast. This is Tony. I'm back
in South Texas in the border lands, after just going
on tour for three weeks. Me and I want on
a little Roust Belt tour. It was on the road
for three goddamn weeks. Went up to h I took
my time getting back down here too, which was nice.
Went through Arkansas, Goddamn Western Arkansas has a lot of
nice stuff, a lot of nice stuff, and I watch
it tall mountains. Wish I had more time to explore there. Vernonia, Lettermanny,
I had no evaculate endemic, a river scoured novaculated endemic.
No evaculate, of course, is just basically biogenic silica. It's
mud composed of the bodies of radiolarians and diatoms, which
are single celled plankton that build their shells out of glass,
out of silica, and then they accumulate at depth in
the ocean, and these thick beds of mud which later
lithify and turned to stone in this case turning into novaculate.
That was a fucking cool habitat to see. So these
this river side novaculate deposits, probably because you know, the
area is so lush. The entire eastern half of the
country is so lushed since it gets more rain. Again,
if you look at a satellite map, the hundredth meridian
is where the content starts to dry out as you
move west. That these it's so lush that these, you know,
river scoured areas are the only places you get to
barren novaculate where plants like Amsonia who brick the eye,
and Vernonia letter mannii. And there's another Sylphium species there
like a I think it's undescribed. My friend Adam is
gonna hopefully work on it and describe it. But they
grow on these, you know, basically out of cracks in
this novaculate rock. This smooth shirt and evaculate kind of
looks like shirt. But that was a fucking cool site. Man.
I was just man, I was rolling in it. I
was just having such a good time coming down living
in the truck, even though I had poison ivy all
over my legs torso and mildly on my balls but
not that bad on my balls. And it went away
pretty quick, I think because I I knew I got it.
I stopped at a hotel and texts Sarcana shout out
to the uh, what is it? What was it? The
Crepit Hotel. It was really not. It was really kind
of rough in there. It was I'll be honest, there
was a working person's hotel. But I felt good about
staying there. It's definitely not the place they're gonna throw
you out when they find out you snuck in two dogs,
not just the one you have the phony service animal
car for. Well, it's not phony, but Louis's actually a
service animal. She is registered service animal, and she's been
trained and behaves amazingly. But I don't really have a
condition that necessitates having a service animal aside from being
fucking nuts. Okay, I'm fucking nuts. That's gonna be if
I ever get shaken down an airport or something for
the service animal thing. And they just they're like, you know,
you don't need that. I'm just gonna break out into
a hysterical rant about how I'm fucking nuts. I'm fucking
nuts anyway. But they shout out to the hotel in
texts arcana because they were really a commonating there. You
could tell it's like the hotel. It was like Windom Garden.
I think it's Windom Garden in text Arcana, but half
the people at the Windom Garden in Textarkana you can tell,
actually live inside there. It was cool in a way. Man,
It was like you know, because they were friendly. It
was they were friendly people living there. But it was
kind of rough. You know, text Arcana is a little rough.
But I went in there. I got the Don Dish
soap slatter that shit all over my legs. Got any
you Rushi? All that was on my legs off and
this is you Rushia? All that quite likely went through
my pants. I was wearing jeans. I was wearing just
some fucking Dicky's jeans, Like I'm kind of loose fitting.
You know. That's the key in the heat is you
want like you wear an excel, you wear a shirt
size bigger than you are, heavy cotton. Make sure it's
bigger than you are so it's not tight, so you
get some airflow. But at the same time it's wicking
up the sweat and it's keeping the sun off of
your skin so you're not getting burned. It's really you know,
those those guys, the uh the guys are over there
and Middle East. You know the sheepherders with the big
white robes and stuff. They they know what they're doing.
I can't believe. I don't the bedoon know who's that.
I don't know what the fuck I'm making it. I'm
making an American of myself. My sense of geography is.
I mean, I think I have a pretty decent sense
of geography for being a fucking American. I've been on
five continents and I'm always looking at mass but still
I should know about the sheepherders that were at along
s white robes. Anyway, the point is I went in
there and I wiped the fucking you rush you off
myself with this don dish soap in the shower, and
I think that cut the That cut in half the
time that I would have been itching and rashing, you know,
because I've gotten it earlier that day at the lighton
Area Pelosi. Spot Light and Area Pelosa is in Simaru Basi.
The Alantis family, the Castilla family, if you know the
genus Castilla, and it's uh Lightnary. Pelosi is known as
Corkwood and there was a there's Corkwood Conservation Area on
the Missouri Arkansas border Adam Black told me about the spot.
I went in there and fuck, you could see the trees.
It's so cool. They look like mangroves. They're normally growing
in inundated areas in water. But the water I don't
know if the area is in a drawer right now
or what. There was no water, it was just mud,
but they've got those inflated bases, and I wanted to
go see him, and there was just God, there was
Rexia there too, that cool melostone, you know it was
I think it was Rexia virginica. And then I saw
another Rexia species later on. But you had to walk
through all this poison ivy to get there. And I
was like, ah, fuck, man, really all right, fuck it,
I'm just gonna do it. And it's gonna be on
my boots and my pants, but it's not gonna get
on my legs. Well, that shit made it through the Russia, obviously,
sitting in a car, made it through the pants and
started interacting. Started, you know, my skin started absorbing it,
and I started getting that itch. You know, it feels
like an itch like it starts off feeling like someone's
taking a hair and like tickling your skin and then
when you feel that you got a few hours until
your break it out in a full out rash. And
that's how do you rush? He all works, you know,
your immune system starts picking it up. Is a mild
irritation at first. Next thing you know, you're breaking out
in the fucking rash and you can't help but want
to just go stand under hot water in a shower
and just feel the ecstasy of having those itches finally.
Uh scratched. So anyway, that was that was that, but
it went away. It didn't last too long, thank god.
I thought, I gotta I got I get poison ivy
so bad. I keep a dose of presn zone around that.
I got a pharmacy in Mexico just to uh, just
in case, you know, in case it gets really bad.
But I couldn't figure out it was chiggers first or anyway,
this is all shit. You don't have to worry about
in the West and half of the country as much.
You know, siggers. You don't get schiggers out west that bad,
thank god. Uh, you get poison oak, but it's in
the desert is generally not too bad anyway. But yeah, man,
Arkansas was just loaded. And then there was I saw
the genus elephant Topis again which I hadn't seen in
a while, which is it's in the composite family. It's
an Astaeci, it's got purple heads. It's in vernonioid subfamily,
which is a huge family in Brazil. Uh. And it's
the family the subfamily. Rather, it's not family, subfamily, the
subfamily of the iron weeds, which we get of course
in you know, from Texas you get Vernonia Larceni and LENNHEIMERII,
which are both kind of wooly. Larceni is fucking insane.
That's the one you get in like the West Texas Desert,
the beginning of where the Edwards Plateau starts, descending into
the Chiuahua Desert, in places like Sanderson, What a lovely town,
Sanderson Motels and Neon signs. But uh, but you know,
you get the iron weeds, uh in what was it
like Missouricha and uh, Vernonia Missourika and Vernonia fasciculata and
some of the other ones you get up in in
the Midwest, in the Chicago area. But anyway, elephant Topas
is in that same subfamily, and of course Vernonia letter
up Manni had that no vaculated endemic I just mentioned,
But Elephantopis is. It's cool. I didn't realize. I hadn't
seen it in a few years. But it's got it's sincephalus.
It's got a head of heads. So you've got a
bunch of tiny purple flowers aggregated together in a single capitulum,
and then you've got a bunch of those capitula later on,
you know, in the next world down aggregated together and
then subtended by three leafy bracts. So it looks it
ends up looking like you know, from far away, you'd
think it was in ruby ac you think it's like
one of those how Stonia relatives or scenario relatives, or
you'd think it would be like some kind of mint
like you think the inflorescence almost looks like a verticilast,
like a whirl you know, like you see on like
a mint stem or a salvia stem, like some of
the salvias do that too, you know, same thing. It's
a vertiicilast or a bunch of tiny flowers aggregated together
whirling around the stem like that Pynanthemum virginica. Same thing.
So it was cool to see that. I hadn't seen
that in a while. So I ended up I ended
up going to another spart spot in Arkansas on the
way down. Uh what was it? Someone wrote me from it.
They were kind of mad because I talked about how
it needs to burn. I think they took it personally
and I was like, I put up like an Instagram
video where I mentioned, like, god, I just this, you know,
this all needs to burn, like this is they They
had a photograph on the little informational kiosk of what
the spot looks like after a burn, you know, and
it was understory of ferns. It was like a savannah
understory of ferns, some scattered trees. Really nice but you know,
a really nice place to hang out. But then what
it looked like when I was there, it was dense
and I had mentioned in a video like you know,
it needs to burn. Whatever it's hasn't been managed for fire.
They haven't been burning. And I think someone who I
didn't know, someone who manages the site, wrote me it
was like I'm really They were like really sad that
I I was like, I wasn't bad mouthing you guys's work.
I said, it needs to burn, that's all. I don't
I don't know the nuances, who's managing this place or whatever.
I'm sure it's fucking great. And you know, you guys
are probably have your own you're restricted by funding or
lack of funding whatever. So uh but anyway, this spot
was cool. I went there to see. I went there
to see, uh, Liatrius hesper alagance, which is a type
of blazing star that's got what is it. What's the
common name of shooting star, blazing star? I don't know,
what's the common name of lantris. I don't know. I
was blazing stars meant zelia out west as well, But anyway, uh,
it's a fucking dope species. Looks incredible. It's like this
tall fuck It wasn't flowering yet, but it's this tall
spike of flowers, just really showy ornate flower heads with
really cool looking fieries on the side. You know, it's
a liatrius alone are always fucking cool to see. I
wish we got some on the western half of the country,
as far west as I've seen it as Colorado, And
I think, what is that punk tata out there? And
you get a you get a variety of punk Tatah
Interlingua by by Big Bend in the West Texas Desert.
But that's really kind of it. I think, like the
western plains and then down there in the Big Bend
region is the only spy you get Latrus out west.
It's normally normally an Eastern genus, but god, they're all
fucking great. Look Lyatris bridgesy I is the one of
the coolest ones I've seen, just fucking wild. The fileries
are working as floral attract and it's the fieries are
working as petals because these are generally flower heads or
not petals legules. These are generally flower heads that don't
have legules. I think most Lyatris are discoid. So I
wanted to see liatris hesparella gans because it's just these
dense It looks like the whole inflorescence looks like a
pipe cleaner. You know, it's just these these dense clusters
of flower heads. But it wasn't going off. But yeah,
bridgesy I. If you can look up bridgesy I after
Bridges some fucking dead guy named Bridge apparently, or Bridges.
Look that one up. That's I think that's primarily East Texas.
It's the only spot I've seen it. But holy hell,
that thing's incredible. Miller County sand Hills. That was the spot.
Miller County sand Hills and beautiful. There's the sand Hill
Assembly of God Church. In case you get a in
case you get a hankering from some from for some
Jesus while you're down there. Uh, Miller County sand Hills
just south of Texas Arcana by like twenty minutes down
everybody to the Louisiana Texas Arkansas state line. Okay, closer
to Shreveport. Yeah, I kept seeing signs for Shreveports. Guy,
go with the Whalon Jennings, you know, put some Whalen on.
I fancy Whalen's. I'd like some of that classic country.
It's a cool spot though, so it's it, but it's
sand Hills, but it is. It does need to fucking
burn so many places. When any so many places I
go to in the eastern half of the country, I
realize how important fire is. I want to burn everything.
I see the understory. I want to light it on fire.
Early spring, lay fall, I want to burn it. Gets
rid of the ticks, gets rid of the chiggers, gets
rid of a lot of them, it's not going to
get rid of all of them. And also clears out
all that dense understore. You get so much rain in
these places that to me being out being used to
being out west where everything gets so dry in the
summer and everything's at risk of a wildfire. And I'm
generally used to botanizing in deserts and area to areas. Anyway,
I see all that shit, all that fuel, and I
just realized, Man, it's like I want to I want
to clear it out, you know. I think that's I
think that's just part of our species. Those are the
habitats we prefer. We prefer more open areas, if anything,
for all the bugs and ticks and sugars, especially that
you get when it's just dense, you know. And I
was looking at one of these, one of these. I
was looking at Miller Counter Miller County sand Hills. Actually
I was looking at the forest there and I'm like, fuck,
this needs to burn so bad. I was at the
at the light and area Pelosis Spot Corkwood Conservation Area
in southern Missouri. Man, Missouri's got some weird vibes. Southern
Missouri it does not feel like a friendly spot. Holy shit.
It was like, ah, whole time I was there, I
kept being like, thank God, I'm not black in this area.
Fucking hell. You know, get a little bit too much
melanin in your skin, you get up put on some list.
The fucking copsule ro anyway, but uh, and I did
get rolled. I already got rolled there. And it was
funny too. The cop was I will get to the
point eventually, but the cop it was somewhere in Missouri
and he stopped me, and he goes. He sees the
Texas place and he's like, oh. He's like, where you're
coming from? Like Chicago. He's like, oh, where you're going.
I'm like, I'm going back to Texas. He's like, oh,
it's a good place to be leaving from and going to.
It's you know, Lee leaving Chicago head of the Texas.
That's a good It was just, you know, in my mind,
I'm like, just really, really, have you ever been to Chicago?
Do you know anything about it? Have you ever spent
time there? It's actually pretty nice, got a lot of
walkable streets, got decent public transportation. The food will kill you,
but it's delicious. Have you ever tried it? Like? What
are you just being indoctrinated? You know, like everybody, everybody's
just being indoctrinated by by social media, by the culture war.
Like God, just settle down, just fucking take it easy.
But he let me off with a warning. But it's
funny though too. When I'm in those situations, like when
the cops said that, I was like, oh, yeah, absolutely,
Like I'm not gonna I want him to think that,
I you know that I'm agreeing with them, like I'm
an infiltrator. I want him to I want to fucking
leave that situation without any heat. I'm trying to you know,
you get the criminal mindset. You want to just you know,
you want to get away. You want to get away
with it, you want to get away. I'm not gonna
fucking argue with the cop, you know and his uh,
his fifty years of indoctrination with Fox News or whatever
the shit. Just like yeah, all right, man, whatever, just yeah,
you're right, Yeah, absolutely, yeah, definitely definitely feels better to
be going back to Texas that I thirty five quarter
between Austin and San Antonio that's just filled with fucking
billboard there's personal injury attorney billboards, car dealer ships, parking lots,
strip malls, you know, fifteen lanes of highway with frontage
roads that also feel like the highway. I can't wait
to get back there exactly. Yeah, you read my mind.
The officer, thank you. Feel so it's safer here. Those
good damn those libs. Uh but uh anyway, so but
the this sand Hill Prairie conservation what is it Miller
County Sandhills was just uh, was just dense. And the
same thing with that spot the Corkwood Conservation area where
I saw light in area Pelosa, Like you look at
the forest there because there was a there's like a
little turnaround at that Corkwood Conservation area where you pull in.
It's like a little cul de sac. You see the
road and they got a gate across this dirt road
that just goes into the conservation area and the fucking
road is just overgrown to shit. Like there's just saw beautiful.
Uh what was it? Aurelia spinosa, like a giant one
in flower. The flower had the inflorescence is like six
feet tall, three feet I you know, hundreds of tiny
white flowers. Looks like a giant nolina flowering or something
beautiful fucking plant. But uh, you know, I looked at
the forest there and I was like, I don't want
to go on that. There's fucking poison ivy, it's all overgrown.
There's fucking probably ticks and sigers everywhere. Like, I just
want to burn it, you know, I want to wait
till fall, till the nice season. You get a windy
you get a day when it's not very windy, it's
a little damp, and you set it all on fire.
And that's good. And that's what you know Native people
were probably doing for thousands of years. I mean, we
know they were doing over thousands of years. And before
Native people were here, you know, fifteen twenty, thirty thousand
years ago, it was fire. It was lightning doing it.
And that's that's the way it is. I mean, the
fire suppression out east blows my mind. It's so crazy. Man.
You need fire in these every one of these fucking habitats.
I mean, that's that's a way of cleansing out all
the dead material. You know, it's not gonna it can't
break down fast enough. You've got to burn. Uh. But man,
sand Prairie was the magic words sand hills. And there's
sand all over these areas because it's all been river deposited.
There's so many river systems there that and they've been
meandering back and forth so much like how did the
sand at that sand hill? Normally you can figure out
what river system dumped it to by looking at a map.
You know it's because I mean, sand either gets to
these places because it weather, it's out of sandstone, or
it's blown in. Like if the base rock is sandstone,
which I don't think it was here, it's all limestone,
but double check, I might be wrong. I didn't. I
didn't look. But in most of the Midwest it's it's
the base rock, the parent rock. The country material is limestone.
The country rock is limestone, or it's either it's so
it's either whether that of sandstone, wind blown eolian or
or river deposited. It's the only way that the sand
gets to these places. So the spot I went to
in Cape Girardo, which I pronounced Cape Girardo. The fuck
is with everyone in Missouri mispronouncing their own cities names.
That's not how that's how you pronounced it New Madrid,
they pronounced it Madrid. That's not how you say. It's
not how you say Madrid. It's not Madrid. You know,
it's like New Yorker's in Houston. Houston, but uh, anyway,
It'll always be Houston to me. But yeah, that that
San Prairie south of Cape Girardo, that was such a
fucking cool spot because I was I was sitting there
looking at a map and trying to figure out why
the fuck there's what looks like a mesa just south
of Cape Girardo, Missouri, and then realized, oh wow, this this,
this shit had been cut, basically cut, and that that's
an old river bed had been cut by the river.
You know, how are many millions of years ago? Holy shit?
And today the river is like ten miles east of
that location. It's so cool to think about it. I mean,
you look at all these river systems in the central
US and it's you know, it's fucking so cool to
think about, you know, a fluvial geo morphology. Almostly these
nice But yeah, how did the sand get there at
that Miller County sand Hills spot? I don't know, but
I want to go back. I want to go back
for more because in those sandy sites. That's where you
end up finding all the cool, all the cool drought
power plants, all the more dry adapted plants. You know,
these sandals act like a little biogeographical island, a micro
site surrounded by the more music and denser forest, you know,
because it takes a lot to grow on sand, you know.
Like that's the spot near Cape Girardo, which I think
what was that called sand Hill Sand Prairie Conservation Area. Yeah,
Sand Prairie Conservation Area. That was a fucking great site
to be That was, Man, it was so cool, you know,
and and go to go look it up, look it
up on on Google Maps, and then put it into
terrain mode and look up. Look at the you could
see I mean, there's like you could see where the
river cut through. Like look at Cape Girardo today. The
river goes south of Cape Girardo and then flows east
and then cuts a little hole in this massive rock
that runs generally southwest to northeast south of Cape Girardo.
Not massive rock. It's like hilly. It's like hilly areas.
It's hills. Basically, I'm guessing the base rock is limestone. Okay,
I had to double check this I'm using the rocked
app roc KD. You should download this and look at
It's fucking great. It's such a useful app. Man really
gives you cut some context of what you're standing on. Yeah.
So the rock there, I'm looking at it, it's TAM's group.
It's roughly four hundred and twenty three to three hundred
and ninety three million years ago. Stratigraphic names are bailey limestone,
flat gap limestone, grassy knob, hirt, backbone limestone, et cetera.
And so that's that's part of the rock. And then
what is this stuff over here? Saint Peter's sandstone Everton Formation. Oh,
so it might be it is old sandstone. So there
is sandstone in south of Cape Girardo, so maybe some
of that sand has been weathered out of there. But actually, no,
it wasn't, because I remember looking at the sand itself
on that sand Prairie conservation area south of Cape Girardo, Missouri,
and seeing that it's a lot of it isn't even sand.
It's like large grained pebbles. It looks like river deposited pebbles,
the same stuff you'd see on a Mississippi River beach.
But uh, I'll tell you what, though, I want to
spend a lot more time in that area. It looks
like there's tons of cool shit. The culture there's kind
of bleak. You know, got some mean stairs. I got
a mean old Caucasian ladies stare or three. You know.
If someone drives by and his yeah, they look at
you that like that, I just shit myself pouting face
like you wave to them and they're just nah. They
don't say anything like all right, Well, that's nice to
see you too. Maybe I'll take you out to Denny's. Huh.
I don't even think do they have a Denny's in Capere.
Who's ever crashed the Dennis in Cape Girardo? Who's ever
closed the Dennis in Cape Girardo? Right, spent twenty four
hours in there. It was a lot easier to do
when you could smoke. I guess, huh oh wow. Look
at rocked Look at west the Cape Girardo. These pink
scattered formations that looks really fucking cool. What is that?
Most of it's been eroded, but there's you can still
see the top layer of this pink formation. Saint Francois
Mountains Volcanic Supergroup Age Miso Proterozoic sixteen hundred million years
one point six billion years to one billion years. Stratigraphic
name tom Sack group, Butler Hill group. What is tom
thaum suck? Description chiefly alkali rhyolitic ash flow tufts, lava
flows and god damn, that's cool. But keep in mind
all this stuff, because it's in the Midwest, is beneath
a lot of vegetation, so it's not gonna be like
in the desert. That's what's so nice about deserts. You
go to the deserts, you could just see the fucking
naked rocks. You know, the rocks are already naked for it.
There's no pesky plants to get in the wake. It's
a lot easier to get context if you're in If
you're looking at geology in the Midwestern East coast, you
got to go to a road cut, a railroad cut,
or a river. That's what cuts through this stuff. But
definitely check out San Prairie Conservation area south of Cape Girardo,
and certainly check out the Crisp Museum. Go visit my
friends in a Crisp museum. What was her name, Helen Ellen?
I don't know. She was a really nice lady. She
was really chill about bringing the dogs inside. You know,
because Jack's fifteen, he's old. He's an old man. I
can't leave him in a car. He's got heart issues.
And plus they don't like to be alone. And anyways,
it's Chris Museum is really cool. They got a cool
natural history section. Kohokia Mounds is around that area. All
these Mississippian cultures. You know, that's another thing I wish
I knew more about. God damn these cultures that were
building fucking pyramids a thousand years ago, fifteen hundred years ago.
When did they go out? I think in like the
twelve hundreds. Why did they go out? I don't know,
like why did their civilizations collapse? You know what else
has a good, good exhibit on some of those early
early Native American cultures was Field Museum. I guess there
were there were really complex cultures analogous to like, you know,
Mayan An Aztec cultures in Ohio, in fucking Ohio. You know,
you drive through Ohio now and it's just land of
mean honkies. Actually that was a cool thing to when
we were going through central Ohio. Me and l I
got i get. Ohio scares me sometimes, you know, it does.
I'll just be honest, it does. I've had bad experiences
in Ohio. I've I got stuck there once after getting
off a freight train that I took from Little Ferry,
New Jersey, it took a turn in Deshler, Ohio and
started heading south. Was that the name? I should look
this up because that was a That was a fucking
wild experience. People were still cool, but also they were
cool with me. But also I didn't have neck tattoos yet.
And it was before all like the heavy culture war
stuff started popping up in America and like Tea Party
US versus them, the Libs are trying to fucking indoctrinate
our kids, like all that shit. Like this is like
two thousand and five, you know, I think, like all
the team remember all that tea party shit started like
two thousand and eight, and that's when things really the
culture war really ramped up, all this dumb shit. And
then now it's just both sides are just fixated on
culture war. You know, they tend to think they're right.
Is obviously a little more insane, but I'm definitely not
a centrist. But uh, you know, the fucking I've definitely
seen a lot of fucking crazy, uh, coming from all
all around, you know, coming at you from all angles. Yeah. Yeah,
it was Deshler, Ohio. I got trapped in Deshler, Ohio overnight.
That was a fun experience, though it ended up being spooky.
It was definitely and you know one of those moments
where you're like, we just don't fucking talk about religion
or politics. If I don't talk about religion or politics
with these guys, we can we could chill. But I went.
They had like a little rail fan park, you know,
like these like older, generally Caucasian men who are really
into trains, but like photographing them, not like riding them
or or you know, using them for free transfer or
anything like that. And so I had had the and
I had my bike with me too. So and my
bike had got in a flat. It was all fucked up. No,
I think I fucked up the actual I don't know
either way. I had to get off this train because
it was going south not west. I was trying to
go back to Chicago. I got off hung out in
Deshler overnight, and I had my bike with me, so
they didn't think I was hitchhiking. I told them I
was just riding my bike, and so that obviously if
I told them I was hitchhiking, they would have thought
I was, you know, a little more sketchy. Maybe, I
don't fucking know. Definitely, don't tell him you riding the train.
But I hung out overnight and they had this little
rail fan park in Deshler where you could listen. You
could listen to the scanner, you know, and hear like
what the conductor of a train is saying to the dispatcher.
And it was I think it was CSX was the
railroad company. But I ended up hanging out. They had
a little fire there that man, some of these dudes
were just like you could tell they weren't loaded like
they were just like working class dudes. One of them
was one of them was sleeping in his car with
his dog. You know. He was a really nice guy.
But one of them, you know, I told him that
I was riding my bike through I got a flat
or had a mechanical issue. So I was kind of
stuck there, and so I just hung out and didn't
volunteer too much information that would make them be wary
of me. But I just ended up hanging out with
them that night and we got along. It was chill,
and they one of them gave me a blanket. They
had these little lawnchairs stood up. I slept in this
this lawn chair around a fire. And then this one
guy was cool too. I remember he said it under
his breath, but he's like, man, if you're trying to
get to Chicago, is an or an Ohio accent whatever
that is, you know in like the cornfields, so a
little bit, you know, maybe a little bit of a
southern accent. There's something little bit of rural America, you know, uh,
the real America. It's God diam right. This guy was like,
there's a there's a there's a local that comes up
from the south whatever the big terminal was south that
takes this turn. Because that's the whole reason that Railfan
Park was there, was because it was like a diamond.
You know, you can go southwest or east, I think
even go you go north too. It was a diamond.
So it was a big crossing of trains, a lot
of train traffic through there. This guy's like, there's a
train that comes up from the south. At about six am.
You could probably catch that and go, what's just cha?
Kinda like he kind of said it under his breath,
you know, and I was like, boom, that's it. That's
what I wanted. That's exactly what I'm trying to do, Sir.
I didn't say it, of course, but my heart skipped
a beat when he said that. I was like, fuck, yeah,
I can get out of here, because there's you know,
you can't hitchhike in Ohio, especially in a in a
dominant Anglo area. It's the way. And I'm not being
racist against white people. I'm just saying, you know, in
a dominant Anglo area, you're not gonna have luck getting
the fuck out of Ohio. You know, it's gonna be it. Well,
it depends too, I've had fucking you know, in other states,
I've had luck. It's it's a class thing. Obviously. I
feel like working class people are little bit more down
to help you out. But definitely in Ohio there is
an ara of like paranoia and suspicion. Maybe it's a
little bit a little bit of that heavy religious shit,
the flavor of the region, like that certain kind of
I don't know what the fuck it is. I can't
figure out I'm trying to say this without getting myself
in hot water with anybody, but there's definitely a fuck
you're gonna have trouble hitch I can in fucking northern Ohio.
So yeah, so I was like, fuck, yeah, okay, that's it.
So we just I ended up passing out. This other
dude passed out in his car. The other dudes that
were hanging out there left and he passed out in
his car with his dog, and I ended up hearing
that train coming at six in the morning. It was
foggy as hell, and I went and I hopped on it,
and I fucking wrote it threw Gary, Indiana into the
South side of Chicago and was so fucking happy to
not be in deshriller Ohio anymore. That said, when Al
and I were going through Ohio, which is the whole
reason I started talking about this fucking five minutes ago.
You listen for the disjointed rants sometimes some of you do.
I know you do. When I was going through When
we were driving through Ohio, Central Ohio, was expecting it
to be much the same flavor, which is kind of
scary when I'm in certain like certain areas of Missouri
or Ohio, and it's a dominant Caucasian vibe. I get
a little scared because there's certainly a paranoid, suspicious and
very turned up, very angry tone there. You know, the
culture where those people, many of them, have been manipulated
by the right wing media to be very very angry
about shit that either doesn't affect them or that is
not a threat to them in the first place. And
so it's fucking scary, you know. Plus you get the
whole weaker, you know, opioid epidemic thing. I'm really pigeonholing here.
I'm really getting myself in trouble. But anyway, but I
was I was excited to see that, like central Ohio
was mostly working class black, and I felt safer, I
felt more chill, I felt a more chill tone. So yeah, man,
Like we went through Columbus, we went through fuck man,
I forget where we were going through. We were we did.
I did a video on a very heinous bathroom gas
station bathroom we encountered. We had to, you know, it
was so filthy we had to make a three minute video.
I mean it was like that pungent, burning rotten egg
smell coming out of the floor drain, and that was
either in Ohio or or eastern Indiana, but either way,
I remember driving through there and I was like, oh,
this is not what I expected. Like, this is not
you know, this is not that it doesn't feel so
scarily red. It doesn't feel so frighteningly red, you know.
But uh yeah, but fucking fucking uh. Would have loved
to spend time in some more areas there. There's so
many places I went through. I wanted to come through
Indiana on the way down going back to Texas. There's
a bunch of cool shit there. Penstem In demii, really
cool penstemen. It's an endemic. It's like one of the
Indiana's only endemic plants, Penstemen demii, which flowers in May.
I was too late for it anyway, But there's you know,
and there's all these cool glades you know, which again
is just a dry micro site surrounded by more music.
Woodland saw a really cool one in Joplin, Missouri. Speaking
of scary places, you know where people just seem turned up.
That's like, that's gonna be a spot where someone's gonna
roll cold by your ass. You know, someone's gonna like, uh,
some fucking angry pink dude in an oversized truck is
gonna scream at you when so the last time that happened,
that happened to me not too long ago, I'd have
a you know, it's kind of funny. You just used
having a fine time. Have you listened to a podcast?
And you're not going fast enough for somebody who's riding
your ass and a fucking guy just screams at you,
and he's like pink. He's got a big dipping and
a fucking bunch of Monster Energy drinks. He's all you know,
he's all rolled up on Monster Energy drinks and god
knows what else and just fucking rolls coal screams at you.
Maybe he calls you something, you know, but he's like
also pink too, Like he's kind of sunburnt and fucking
you know, you know, like that pink color. Anyway, Uh,
you know, I've got like the friends of Northern European
descent who turn kind of pink. You know, they got
to put a lot of sunscreen on. But by Joplin, Missouri,
where was that What was the name of that spot?
I gotta look this one up too. It was a
chert g LID. I did a video on it. Lyatris
Ersuda is there. Yeah, that was at Shoal Creek in Joplin.
That's a fucking cool spot. And I got a little
visitor center. Uh you get at that spot, they got
a little visitor center. It's not at the spot where
the actual glade is. The lady in there was super
fucking nice. You know. I think anyone who's into nature
at least in those areas is super fucking chill and
just stoked to have people around. But yeah, Shoal Creek
Visitors Center, shout out today. I'm over there at Shoal Creek.
They got a nice little educational area for the kids.
And then the glade, which is on the west side
of what's actual Shoal Creek there is fucking credible to
It's a shirt glade, so more of that biogenic silica,
and there's a punthia there. There's some cool solegendella there.
There's that liatris heerseudo, which is endemic to that region
like western Missouri on down into northern Louisiana. Does it
go up? And I would all I would assume probably
that was a really cool one to see. It's a
Liatris another Blazing Star or what is it? Shooting Star?
Let me look this up, like getting I'm turning into
a geriatric Italian already, like it is, I'm like fucking
acting twenty years older than I am. Yeah, yeah, blazing Star.
I don't use common names anyways, you shouldn't use don't
use common names. They're fucking you know, we've been through
this before. It's been five years. I've been doing this now.
You know common You can learn a common name. You
can just use the genus name instead. Latris, how many
letters you got there? Seven blazing Stars? What twelve? Thirteen?
Come on, Latris. You learn a genus, you learn other
species in that genus just by knowing that genus, and
you know, so there you go. Anyway, Uh, the taxonomy
is implied, the evolutionary relatedness is implied. But yeah, addresses
diatres arseudo was really cool. Looks like a big Thistlet's
got a big swollen flower head with these recurved fieries
that look kind of kind of spiky and folded, you know,
like convolute. But yeah, anyway, another cool plant that was
at that Shoal Creek area, That shirt glade was and
I just have a blast looking at the rocks. Man,
I'm like, what the fuck you got that conchoidal fracture
like you get with a lot of hirt, with a
lot of silica, silica baced rocks, you know, nice to
conchoidal fracture. Get to look at the texture of these
things to figure out what it is, you know, texture, feel,
how it fractures, et cetera. These Uh it's my little
geology primer for rock id. But there was Femoranthus calisinus there,
which was you know, the with I don't know the commonname,
flame flower, whatever the fuck it is. It's it's it's
in the bitterroot family monte ace so it's succulent. It's
got a little succulent finger like leaves, and then this
pink flower with many stamens. But Femoranthus is a cool
genus for me because you know, when I was learning
botany in California, I don't think you get any out there. Yeah,
there's none. There's no Femoranthus in California, Nevada so far
as I know. Uh, they're in Mexico. There's twenty species
listed on ninastros. They're in Mexico. You get a lot
out east, primarily in glades. That would be a good
indicator species to see where the good glades are, Like,
go to a naturalists, go to explore type in Femoranthus
p H E M and uh, because I fucking love glades.
Like I wanted to go to Nashville too on the
way down, but I was like, I just don't have
it a fucking time. I don't want to go and
only spend two days in in you know, around the
Tennessee Glades. I want to like, do I want to
go there when I have a week? But anyway, yeah,
so you know you could that's a good indicator species
for a rocky area, for a rocky site, you know,
through Texas through I guess there's some in New Mexico.
Looks like eastern Colorado, Uh, northern Arizona, southern Utah. Yeah,
what a fucking great. Well what is this one in Illinois? Oh?
What is this? Is this a site in central northern
Illinois near Dixon that's got a lot of Femorantus. What's
going on there? Femoranthus rugo spermis So that looks nice.
I'm looking at some of these habitat shots where is it?
Where is this Franklin Creek State Natural Area in northern
Illinois near Beautiful Dixon? Have you ever been kicked out
of it? Denny's in Dixon, ILLINOI what river is that?
God the fucking there is so much cool ship in
the Midwest. Granted you got to have a car to
get to most of these places. And uh, you know,
there's been a somewhat socially conserved conservative vibe in many
of these areas, but which means that maybe they're not
appred I'm fucking maybe there's less of an appreciation than
you might otherwise have for some of these quote natural areas.
I just assume that, you know, when you see, you know,
a big Christian school located in a town next to
a Nashville area, you're gonna assume maybe there's less there's
less appreciation for the biodiversity. I don't know. It's a
difference of worldviews, class of civilizations. I gotta stop saying
that shit. I'm gonna get you know, I'm getting myself.
This is everybody podcast, now, right? Is that what this is?
I gotta stop. Okay, anyway, Stone Barn, Savannah, Nachusa grasslands.
Oh yeah, I've heard of this spot. Damn, there's some
good ship there. And looking at a terrain map especially,
you should always have your map on the terrain layer,
never on the flat layer. If you're if you're quote
map sturbating, you're looking at places on a map to
you might want to go look for plants. Have it
on terrain. You gotta see that topography. And you're getting
some topography here, which is cool. God damn, and download
that rock that too, so but yeah, Joplin, uh yeah,
Femoranthus rugo spermis near Dixon, Illinois. That's that's definitely on
my map. Now I gotta go to. But this Chert
Glade and Joplin was fucking gray. And there's some actual
cool cliffs down by the river, you know, like steep, decent,
like someone was climbing there. There's some cool terrain. The
Opuncha there I think was just Saspatosa which may have
been Humifusa. Maybe they they split it up, but it's
a prickly pair. And then there was oh, there was ruilla,
which is just I think it was just Ruellia humorless.
But it was a white flower ecotype and the flowers
were just getting ready to open. We were there later
in the day the flowers were just getting ready to open.
So to me, that implies moth pollination along with that tube.
That tube flower God. I got back in the man Freyda,
I got back to my house. I got Manfreida lounge
of flora, a gave relative. It's like a soft leaved
relative of a gave. Someone was actually trying to lump
it into a gave at one point, which is fucking stupid.
They ended up it was nested within a gave and
the proper course of action was taken instead of lumping
Manfreda into a gave. Because it's so different in so
many ways, different flowers, different habit It's not monocarpic. It's
got a root, perennial root and herbaceous leaves. So the
leaves are you know, are temporal or the leaves are ephemeral,
and excuse me, the leaves are ephemeral and the root
is permanent, and just shouldn't it would never in a
million years. It shouldn't be, you know, lumped with the gave.
They're closely related. It's good to know. But so what
they did it was it was nested within so it
had some agaves on above it on the phylogeny, and
a lot of agaves below it. And so what they
did is they just looked at the agaves that were
above it, the species that were classified as a gave,
looked at those, and then created new genera for those
because they were weird already, like a Gave bractiosa became
Paleoa gave bracdiosa. They were weird already. They didn't they
didn't they were unique enough to be to warrant separation
from the rest of the genus Agave akino, Agave striata,
et cetera. But anyway, I came back to Texas and
the man freight to launch of floor was going off,
sending up an inflorescence about two feet tall. White flowers,
white tubular elongated flowers that bloom, you know, start to
open around six pm. The flowers smell like vanilla and perfume,
like so many moth pollinated flowers do so many unrelated
moth pollinated flowers, whether it's they're in Aposta a seed
oleander family, the milkweed family, or whether they're in the
cactus family, or whether they're in uh, you know, the
agave family. Whatever. All have the same scent or like onathra.
A lot of evening primroses are obviously moth pollinated. They've
got that same perfume, alcohol like scent. Except with this
man freate a lounge of Flora, which is a Star
County species. It's a South Texas species. I don't think.
I don't think you get it too far north. I
think it's mostly like Southern Texas. Great fucking plant, though,
really cool. You know, you'll you'll find it growing with
horse cripplers and astrophyte and mysterious et cetera. This was
it was going off at six pm and smelled incredible
and I have two of them, and I just germinated
a bunch of seed, and so I came back and
I was just, you know, it's so cool to be
able to study plants just because they're in your yard.
You know, if I wanted to study manfreate a lounge
of Flora, normally I'd have to drive out to the
field where they grow the few sites I know where
they occur in South Texas and go hang out there,
you know, from when they open till late at night,
you know, to see what's visiting them here. I could
just do it with my front yard. You know, I
go outside, I photograph, I'm opening, and then I come
back in, you know, have a little cup of tea
or something, fuck around, get some work done, go back
out at midnight and see what's pollinating them. But yeah,
they smell incredible, man. And I saw like, yeah, this
four inch wide moth hitting the other moth pollinated flowers.
I got manda Villa lenugenosa, which is an apostanacy. It's
another plant you encounter here in the Peote gardens a
little bit further west of where I am. Yeah, I
was trying. I mean I heard I heard on a
grapevine that my house is hot with the code enforcement
for the city I live in, which is just fucking
just like really, really, you guys already tried this a
year ago. You were already bested with me for having
a quote, unkempt yard, and then I got it. I
ended up dealing with it just by being polite, being
polite and being kind, but extremely obnoxious and over informative
to them and just hassling them every day. You know, hey,
come by, check this out. These are native plants. This
is what I do for a living. I'm a botanist,
blah blah. You know, we actually just filmed the show
called Kill Your Lawn. Lawns are you know, bad and
numerous ways. They're bad for the water supply, they're bad
for the soil. They make the area around your house
hotter because they're like a heat island. They're only a
little bit better than an asphalt parking lot. It heats
up the ground, you know, versus the transpirational cooling effect
that you get from having a four foot tall thicket
of native plants. You know that you manage and you prune,
and you clip and you cut a path through whatever.
You make it look tidy and nice and with this
shit whatever that means. But it's still a lot of
plant material with you know, those stomato, those little gas
pours on the under sides of leaves that take in
CO two and let out oxygen and water vapor. And
as they let out that water vapor, it's got a
cooling effect because it's water going from a liquid to
a gas state, just like a swamp. Corp. I just
did that, and they eventually backed off and said, all right,
fuck it. This guy's you know, I think what happened
is they just realized I was going to be too
much of a pan ass and let it go. But
why the dude? You know this guy at city hall
is even talking about it in the first place. You know,
it's like it's the man, it'stead of your business. Doesn't matter.
Don't worry about it. Like you you think everybody should
have a lawn, because that's all you know. Your breadth
of experience in the world is infinitesimally small. You haven't
been around, you haven't seen other things. You don't know
anything different. Why do you care? Go find something to do.
Go find some stuff to staple. What do you do?
What do you do at opposite city goll? Go staple
some papers together. Just just get some papers off a desk,
start stapling them. Go have a zoom meeting about something
that doesn't matter. You know that, you know none of
your constituents are aware of. Go go take a bribe
from a developer. What did you go? Find something to do?
There's something out there. Go occupy your time, you know, Ah, yeah,
yeah Jesus, but yeah, Havardi appealins was going up too. God,
my yard is lit up at night. It's so cool.
Like by lit up figuratively speaking here, I mean lit
up with cool moth pollinated plants like the Havardia. A
lot of moth pollinated plants won't even end up emitting
scent until you know, seven eight pm anyway, like right
before dusk. And that's what havardiappalins does, which is a
in the Mimosa subfamily, the miska subfamily of the legume family.
For basi, Havardia is a how many other species in
the genus havardi I should look that up, But it's
one of the best trees species. The plant here doesn't
get huge, doesn't overtake, pops out at like twenty feet
just like Guahio, like Senegalia berlandi, riet like ebony ebenopsis
of bano, like misky. Some of the miskit here can
get upwards the thirty or forty feet tall beautiful fucking
trees nel Tuma glandulosa formerly in the genus Prosopis. But
it's all mimozoids down here in the south tech borderlands. Man,
you get some others. You got Citaroxalon celestrinum, you got
some cool members of rutasi, Amorus helieta, et cetera. But uh,
but and then in the sandsheet you got the you
got Corcus virginiana. But it's an ecotype, the sandsheet ecotype.
It's been through, however, many dozens of thousands, if not millions,
of years of natural selection on the hot, dry, fast, training,
relatively nutrient poor sandsheet. So that population has been you know,
bread a little bit. It's been bred by the environment
the same way that humans will breed crop plants from
their wild ancestors. But obviously the environment is breeding it
for a you know, adaptation to that unique suite of characteristics,
and also pollinators and insect pass et cetera. Anyway, I'm
going on a fucking rant here. We were talking about
glades in western Missouri. The day before I hit that
glade in western Missouri, I was on the side of
the road and beautiful Ardmore, Oklahoma, checking out a rock
out cropping, Beautiful ard More, Beautiful ard Moore, Oklahoma, checking
out a rockout cropping with pensament Kobea and Diosporos virginiana
per simmon. And I think there was a menopappus there.
That's another kind of one, you know more, just like
that suite of North Texas plants. Ringium leven Worth the
eye was there too, which is a fucking stunner, but
that was not blooming yet. You didn't get those big
purple bracts. It's an erringium that gets, you know, upwards,
like three four feet tall. You see it in North
Texas a lot. It's generally going off in September. It's spiny,
it's got really stiff, corriacious foliage, but it's like a
deep purple and pink. It's a really fucking cool plant.
I'm surprised I've never seen that in any native plant guard.
It's like, why is no one using ringe worth the eye.
It's a fucking great species. There was no Putthi a
gill Vessens at this this rocky outcropping in Oklahoma too.
I'm stopping at all these places. The Wachita Mountains look
so fucking cool, you know. Look at that on a
terrain map. It looks like someone pushed again. It's like
at that Sierra Madre oriental thing where it looks like
someone pushed the throw rug up against the door jam
on a hardwood floor. Like that crumpling, you know that
like accordion style crumpling. But in this case, when that
orogeny happened, when those mountains were pushed up, you could
tell the impact came from the south, because all the
mountain ranges are generally bending. They're like a mildly bent
arch that goes from from west to east, all right,
And that's of course how all the rivers flow in
between them. Because the rivers are flowing in between, they're
flowing in the valleys in the troughs of these uplifted
and bent layers of sedimentary rock of marine generally limestone.
I think it's mostly four hundred years old, four hundred
million years old. Yeah, So the collision, and this is
when the super continent Pangaea was being formed. The collision
that formed the uplift that bent those rocks that you know,
pushed that that that throw rug up against the door
jam on a hardwood floor of the lithosphere. Uh. The
continent that did it was or the super the the
plate that did it. A tectonic plate hit it and
collided with it, coming from the south, forming the super
continent of Pangaea. And then about three hundred million years ago,
and this was these were again, this is all calcareous mud,
this whole mountain range. The Wagtas were mostly calcareous mud
formed from the bodies of single celled calcareous plankton, calcium
carbonate plankton, plankton that cocoa lithophores foraminifhra that build their
little look up a cocoa liphoor like an electron electron
scanning microscope of of a coco lithophore c O C
C O L I T H O p h E
r E. They look fucking cool. They look really cool.
They look like these little like a like an aggregation
of a bunch of cheerios coming together or donuts coming
together to form a globe, a sphere. And they got
little ridges on them and stuff. That'd be a nice tattoo.
Somebody out there, go get a cocoa lithophoor tattoo, a
scanning electron microscope of a cocoa lithophor. So they formed
these these, you know, this mud at the bottom of
this ancient ocean. You can still see shit like this
in the ocean in the ocean today in areas you know.
But remember, you go too deep, you hit the uh,
what is it? The calcium? What is it? Calcium compensation depth,
the calcium carbonate compensation depth below below that depth, which
varies depending on what ocean. You know, it's it's variable
depending on what ocean you're in. It's between thirty five
hundred and forty five hundred meters in the Indian Pacific oceans,
but it varies based on you know, basically, how how
the rate of calcium carbonate material forming and sinking holds
up with the rate that the material is dissolving. So below,
But the important thing to know is that below the
calcium carbonate compensation depth, no calcareous mud is accumulating, so
you don't get limestone. So that's why you get. Instead,
you get silica. You get the chirt and the radularian shirt,
whatever it's. It's a more silicious, generally speaking, silicious composition,
silica rich composition of the mud below the CCD the
calcium carbonate, the calcium carbonate compensation depth. And why does
this matter because this is what forms the rocks that
we end up looking for plants on. All right, That's
why you end up getting silica based rock in some
areas that's not volcanic like marine silica rocks versus limestone.
There's a lot of fucking limestone though, and that's why
most of the most of the rock that you get,
I mean, it was mostly calcareous MUDs that formed the
Western Interior Seaway. You know, that was around one hundred
million years ago, which is pretty young, still younger than
the rocks in the Watchita Mountains. And you know, the
limestone that composes most of Texas uh is there because
it was a shallow ocean, so it didn't there wasn't
deep you know, it wasn't even deep enough in a
lot of those areas, UH for the limestone basically to
be filtered out and unable to dissolve or or more
likely to dissolve excuse me, versus being deposited, because beyond
it in the deep oceans, that's where you get a
lot of the biogenic silica that forms the church. If
it's a shallow ocean, you're just gonna mostly get limestone. Anyway,
that said, so you could tell that these the watch
Ittail Mountain were pushed up and they've mostly been worn
down because they're so old. I mean, this is an
uplift that happened three hundred million years ago versus you know,
like thirty five million years ago for the Sierra Nevada.
Let me look at that up. Actually, yeah, Serra Nevada
is still debatable. But I think what I had in
my mind was like thirty five million years. It's between
twenty million and fifty million years for Sierra Nevada. So
I think thirty five million sounds like a good and
relatively young versus the Rockies, which are thought to have
been uplifted a lot earlier, like in the Late Cretaceous,
seventy five million years ago, all right, So being they
were being uplifted when the dinosaurs were still around, you know,
because the dinosaur extinction happened sixty six million years ago,
it's a good it's a good chronological landmark. The Wachitas
are a lot older, so they've had, you know, two
hundred and fifty million extra years to get ground down
and worn by the elements, whether it eroded, et cetera.
But still, what a fucking great man, what a great
mountain range. So much good shit there too. I bet
there's I bet there's how many endemics in the watch
Itta Mountains? Yeah, how many how many how many endemic
plant species in my favorite fold belt of Oklahoma, because
that's what it is. It's a fold belts, a fold
thrust belt, I think is the same thing. It's again,
it's similar. Look at when you see those folds and
that crumpling, that that that throw rug on the hardwood
floor effect. You're looking at mostly marine sediments having you know,
and compaction, convergent tectonic plate action. Same thing you see
in the Sierra Moderate Oriental near Monterrey, Mexico. But it
says here and it's just from the fuck website is
says I'll tell you later. Fourteen endemic plant texts that
have been documented from the Wachita Mountains, several of which
have only been described in recent decades. Jesus Christ, there's
probably quite a few that have not been described yet
as well. God damn like man, Yeah, solid dogo watch atensis.
Oh there's some good stuff. Oh, time to get back
in the truck. I got too much shit to do. Oh.
This is a natural history notebook and joint project of
the Missouri Botanical Guard in the Ecological Health Network and
a restoration ecology lab at Virginia Tech. And it sounds nice.
Oh this is a blog from December twenty fourteen, but yeah, man,
it's fucking oh, there's so cool. I've been wanting to
bonnie there for a while. I look at areas on
a map, on a terrain map, and see these folds
on all this cool, I mean god, and you just
immediately I'm like, oh, I'm looking for stuff. There's got
to be some cool plants there. Again the intersection of
geology and plant life, which is the same thing that
I was doing in Cape Girardo. When I looked at Ben,
I think Ben Thomas actually told me about that San
Prairie Conservation area. He had a book, My friend Ben
that works at Mobile. He had a book and I
was looking through it and I saw the Sand Prairie
Conservation Area and Polygonella americana, which is a really fucking
weird species, really weird cool plant. Looks like a juniper.
It's in the buckwheed family, and it grows in scattered
populations only on sand. I think it's primarily only on
sand deposits, because you know, stuff that grows on sand
doesn't like competition. That's why it ends up growing there.
There were some really cool dryland sedges at this uh
at that sand prairie conservation area near Cape Girardo really
like I normally I overlook sedges. I think they're cool,
but I don't care about them that much. They're not
my main thing. You know. I appreciate them, but I
don't go nuts. And I don't know the terminology, but
I certainly you know, it picked my interest being here
because you see these things and you're like, man, there
was one I think it was, Yeah, it was a
bulbo stylist. It was like turning orange, beautiful color to
these weird leaves. It looks like a grass with these
weird fucking heads on it. And it was dominating here
on these sand planes. And then there was it was
so barren on these sand planes compared to the surround
woodland that there was liking. There was cladonia liking you know,
green and red match the cladonia liking growing on the ground.
There was a punchya put the Essexes potosas scattered here
and there, and then polygonella as well, which again looks
like a juniper or like a tamarisk, like a salt seedar.
But then it's got these these spikes. These are race
seams of tiny white flowers. I put a post up
on Instagram about it, h and the video came out.
I think it was Friday I put it out. I'm
putting out videos like fucking hotcakes, man, just like I
just want to get them done. I've got other shit
to do. I need to get this stuff done and
get it off my plate. But h yeah, that polygonella
was cool because it formed these these shrubs. You know,
it's it's a shrub in areas where the soil is
a little deeper. But then there were areas where it
was really you could tell the soil was not that deep.
By soil, I mean sand, and I don't know if
there was bedrock beneath there, underneath there or what. But
it got like a eight inches tall, and it looked
so different from the other individuals that I was seeing
in other areas of this conservation area that I thought
it was a different plant. I was like, what the
fuck is this? Is this like a weird kind of
It looked like a weird kind of like subshrub flocks species,
or like something in carriophilecey, like a weird pair of
Nikkia or something. It was so fucking weird, and none
of them were none of those were flowering, but I
think it was. Yeah, it was quite obviously just Polygonella americana.
It had, you know, the younger leaves, the younger like
little linear arochoid leaves. It was such a cool spot.
But then a storm picked up really quick to I forgot. Man,
in the Midwest, storms get scary, like I'm not used to.
I haven't been in an area where the storms can
actually be kind of freaky. Like you see it and
you're like, oh shit, that like a wind moves in,
a cold front moves in all of a sudden, The
trees are blowing violently. The clouds on the horizon are
almost black, you know. I started seeing what looked like
it looked like it might have been the funnel cloud
that could have formed that died out, like there was
some slanting going on to the uh, the clouds of
vapor that were forming on the horizon, Like it looked
like it was like it was raining, but it was
coming in at a slant too, like there was a
weird I don't know, man, it just it was spooky.
So I said, all right, let's get the fuck out
of here and and go meet at him Black at
the h the dirty motel at actually it wasn't it
was a nice motel. It was Hampton, and we stayed
at the Hampton and his work paid for it. And uh,
what was a Poplar Bluffs, beautiful Popular Bluff, Missouri. I'm
sure they have some wonderful vacation Bible camps and beautiful
Popular Bluff, Missouri. So enough about this region of a country.
But know that if you live in Missouri or western
Arkansas or eastern Oklahoma, I'm coming for you if it sometime,
I'm want to come out there and uh and do
some do some fucking body, like give it a week
or something. I need to spend some real time out there, man,
And I need to go to Nashville area to check
out some of the Nashville Glades, a bunch of good
ship there, northern Alabama, these whole you know, entire it's
entire region of the country in the central East that
I have not spent much time. Then. I've done so much,
spend so much time out west in California and even
Pacific Northwest early on, but not here. And I'm gonna
be looking for the rocky sites, you know, an the
orogenes looking for the histories, the origenic histories of some
of these mountains, the wachitah Ozarks, the the Appalachians. Holy shit,
there's a lot of good stuff. Man. That's why I
would man if you, if you live in those areas,
got there, but they got to burn. They really need
to burn. The fire suppression, to me is so crazy.
And you think that these fire suppression regimes have been,
it's the way it's been for one hundred and fifty
years basically, you know, since the And I just find
this word is so fucking annoying because you find so
many like young fucking twenty four year old kids on
TikTok overusing it and or college kids applying it the
shit that it doesn't apply to. But when the fucking
European colonialism arrived and decimated, you fucked up the landscape,
you know, which, depending on where you are, started roughly
three hundred to one hundred and fifty years ago. Prior
to that, the fucking man, the landscape must have looked
so different. Not only did you have megafauna, which you
know had huge effects on the flora. I mean, all
the intense grazing of the bison alone and robust populations
of herbivores plus the predators that kept them in check,
which also in effect handled the tick populations because when
you get deer populations, you know, for example, going fucking nuts,
you know and exploding, the tich population explodes too, as
logic would follow, So you had the herbivore effect. And
then all the fires I mean the indigenous people that
Native people were using to steward and maintain these landscapes
for thousands of years, which I'm sure they learned, you know,
was a necessity. God knows how long ago they learned it,
you know, probably a long time. Probably a long time ago.
I mean, it just probably became something where they were
we got to burn these this shit just gets too inundated,
it gets too dense. Well, actually, it probably wasn't even
get I don't know, it probably wasn't even getting to
I don't know. There's so many dynamics I'm unaware of,
Like these ecosystems have been so fucked in the last
few hundred years, it's hard to tell, you know, what
different factors were affecting them and how things have changed.
Once colonization occurred, people were removed the burning was was
was thrown away, you know, the fire suppression started, the
predators were wiped out, things were over hunted, the bison
wear were exterminated. I mean, it's so wild to think about,
you know, but it's and it's something that I'm not too.
It's in a way it's new to me because again
I learned Bodni out west, which is like shit then'
you know, Europeans didn't really have a chance to start
fucking things up there. This this civilization that came didn't
have things just didn't have time to start fucking things
up there large scale until like eighteen fifty, like it's one,
populations really took off, you know, the gold Rush out West,
et cetera versus you know out east its shiit me.
You had a couple more hundred years for the wreckage
to start occurring and for you know, large scale ecosystem destruction,
lands starting to get converted to agriculture and pasture. It's
so wild to think about. But and it's so different too.
I mean, getting so overgrown and innundated so easily because
the ring fall is that much higher where burning is
man like burning is. I mean, but I feel like
burning is a necessity anyway. We gotta have low controlled
burns out west to eliminate fuels so you don't get
massive wildfires. But then you've also got to have burning
in a lot of these woodlands and prairies out east
because there's just so much biomass generated every year due
to the rainfall. This is just the wetter more music
eastern half of the country. And if you don't man,
the fucking the sugars alone will be enough to just
fucking burn at all, you know, And that's what keeps
these ecosystems healthy. Plus the predators too. It's a huge thing,
the predators keeping the deer populations in check anyway. But yeah,
So anyway, moving on from this area though, uh and
going on up to the beautiful rest belt being out
at a rost belt too. We went to Detroit, Detroit,
we went to Pittsburgh, we went to we stopped in Youngstown, Ohio,
out out to Kelly over there with your landscaping company
that hung out with us and drank coffee and in
beautiful Youngstown for a while. Man, these these I love,
these like rust belt. It's kind of depressing and dystopic
and weird, but these rust belt towns with these incredibly
low population densities because the factories closed and there's old
steel mills. Whatever the fuck we went to. We were
looking for a spot to just park the van and
make a sandwich and lurk in someplace had a big
parking lot. We ended up in front of some brewery
in Youngstown that was built in it. It was the
brewery was in an old steel mill, like this giant
old warehouse, like stadium sized steel building, open air steel building,
not open air but you know, no walls inside. And
I mean, I don't drink, but we just went there
because it was a spot to lurk. It was open.
It was like a Sunday. When we rolled through, it
was like we can we can kick it here. No
one's going to run us out of the parking lot
and fill up the water jug whatever. And just being
in that building this you know that once was a
place where they poured molten steel. It was so so
surreal because all the infrastructure is still there, these rusting hulks.
You know, it's like being in a museum. Same thing
with Detroit. Detroit felt like that too, you know, just
the these the old rust belt town low population density.
There's been a lot of gentrification, I guess in Detroit,
I mean any American city. Gentrification is not even the wording,
it's like the it's like basically urban real estate speculation.
Like gentrification is such an absolute term, almost because it's
not what this is anymore. It's not about like a
hip coffee shop. It's about, you know, intense investment speculation
on properties, you know, like sometimes by companies that don't
even aren't aren't even within the country, you know, like
by overseas companies. It's like treating investments, treating the housings
supply in urban areas like an investment, and just the
intense fucking rental prices for some of these places. Now,
I mean Detroit is still you know, comparatively obviously massively
affordable to places like San Francisco, but still it's it's
a priced some some people out. But you know, Detroit, man,
like whole blocks. You're driving past whole blocks that are
just empty. There were houses there once, they've been knocked down.
It's just now it's just like these green fields, like
overgrown with a mixture of mostly probably invasive plants from Europe,
because those are always the ones that colonize and you know,
fill in places in cities. You know, once there's like
a vacant lot or railroad tracks or whatever, and then
there's always a couple natives too, you know, solid dogos,
some milkweed, some cottonwoods, whatever I could, I'd love to
spend a lot more time just looking at that, looking
at the plants that grow in these areas. You know
what ends up there. And obviously the natives that are
there have to be pretty aggressive if they're growing out
of asphalt and concrete and fucked up soil, and they
have to be generally wind dispersed or bird dispersed, like
how are they going to get around? You know, how
are they going to get there in the first place?
Since the habitat, if they're natives, you know, there's no
native habitat left. Everything's been turned into a parking lot
or a road or housing, so you know, where do
they come from? They wind birds, and then there might
be little populations that are able to occupy places that
aren't going to get mode or hacked back or sprayed,
like power line easements, train tracks, vacant lots, even the
fucking roofs of old buildings and whatever I do. All
that restbelt shit's so cool. We spent some time in Detroit.
We had two shows there which was just you know,
basically doing a presentation, having a Q and A doing
a screening to kill your lawn, shooting the shit. It's fun.
I like just interacting with people too. I like, just
you know, what do you guys, I'll just straight up
ask me what do you want to see? I got
photos from all over the world. What do you want
to see? What do you want to talk about? Et cetera.
The show in Pittsburgh was cool. That was just in
a little coffee shop that was It was two in
other also two days we did a show in Chicago.
It was it was great, man, it was really laid back.
We stayed in Ohio. I saw the largest on the
way between Pittsburgh and Detroit. We stopped over at a hotel,
a motor lodge in Ohio and like the outskirts of
Cleveland and saw the largest poison ivy I've ever seen
in my life, growing like thirty feet up a Scotch pine,
you know, with a stem that was had to be
between six and eight inches diameter. It was massive, but
the whole thing was funny about it was the whole
thing was coming up in between this depressing motor lodge
and like a fucking it's like a stereotypical Midwest office park,
you know, with that really slick black asphalt. It's like
the way they do it in the Midwest. I don't
know why it is, but it's just like each region
has its own, you know, Like if you look at
a picture of a bleak office park or a strip
mall in the United States, you can kind of tell
where it is. But you know, if you've been around,
if you've traveled across the commercial cesspool it is most
of the US, you know, you could tell where it
is just by the just by the look of it.
Each region has its own sense of bleakness. In the Midwest,
you know, from like fucking Iowa to Ohio has its own.
It's like that that slick black asphalt, like with the
tar on it they put. I think it's like they
put a ceilant or a tar. I don't know if
it's because of the freezing or what. But but it
was funny because it was the only native plant growing
anywhere besides like the rigor On canadensis, the Caneisa canadensist
formerly Canisa the horseweed, which was fucking everywhere. That's such
a funny case. That's got to be an invasive fucking
plant overseas because that thing is everywhere horsewed. It's called
I don't know why, I've always just known it as canisa.
It's got these tiny little astorac flower heads and it's
fucking everywhere. I saw a huge patch of it in Pittsburgh.
I was botanizing a degraded vacant lot next to a
construction site. What else was growing there? There's some other
cool stuff growing there. Oh, there was the dreaded Bradford
pair to it was. That kind of fills me with Hey,
Bradford pair and crape myrtle. It's crazy. Somebody somebody asked
me the other day on a like a Facebook comment
because I've been actually posting I don't have a personal
Facebook page because I think Facebook's for marks, no offense.
It just is a horrible venue. I hate Zuckerberg whatever,
but I use the I've been using the crime page
Facebook that that company set up and then abandoned because
because it's a good way to educate people. And I
guess a lot of people use it and whatever. So
I've been posting on there and it's easy. I don't
take it too seriously. I don't put much time in
and I just you know, slap together some quick video,
throw it up, do a post whatever. Hopefully people get
something out of it, learn from it. But somebody commented
really innocently, why do you hate crape myrtles so much?
And I just just like went off. I'm you know,
I was like, it's like the fucking crp myrtles are
like the live laugh love sign of horticultural atrocity. They're
just so fucking they're overplanted there. That doesn't mean anything.
They're garbage, they're out of ecological context. They're invasive on
the East coast, they die on the West coast and
just require too much water. I'm sure they're really cool
where they're native, like any invasive plant or horticultural atrocity,
but they're just such a fucking they plant them out here.
When I was I got invited to LBJ Wildflower Center
a month ago, which was great, it was fucking awesome.
I took my kid too. They had this dinosaur exhibit
out there, so she loved it. She still raised hell,
but it was still you know, uh it was easy
to get her entertained otherwise because they had like these
life size replicas of dinosaurs. The Wildflower Center, but also wildflower.
Wildflower is just the weird world. Like, wildflower doesn't mean anything.
If you see a wild they might want to think
about a rebranding sometime. No, I'm you know, I'm not
telling anybody what to do, but I'll be j you know,
Wildflower Center might want to think about a rebranding. This is,
you know, in twenty years, if we're not all annihilated
by a nuclear war, you know, by these fucking uh
primate male humans who are so set on fucking setting
the world on fire. You know, if we're still around,
you might want to think about a rebrand. It's just
wildflower doesn't mean anything. The word wildflower, just like the
Native plant Center. You know, if I was going to
start a native plant center, it'd be like the the
crime pays, fuck you native plant centers. You know, just
like a blatant. They got to put a little aggressive
spin on it. You know, it's just innately kind of spiny.
It's which is good. It's like a cactus. It's like spiny,
but then it's got a beautiful flower that it produces,
and it's got a soft, squishy inside. But anyway, I
was at the wild the Wildflower Center at'll bej and
just on like a half mile away from it. On
the drive there, you have to drive on this road
you go past just this phalanx of crpe myrtles, Like
just getting beaten over the head with these things. Just oh,
it's so painful. It's like with passing each one, I
feel like I'm getting macked in the forehead with a
two by four. I fucking hate crpe myrtles so much.
They're so fucking just bottom of the brain stem, lowest
common denominator, home deepot horticultural shit, you know. And the
thing is people like them for the flowers, which doesn't
fucking that doesn't mean anything whatever. These flowers is a
flowers a flower, all right. I mean if you like that,
if you white, like the way that looks, you could
like the way a native plant looks. It has ecological
context and supports all the pollinators and cool shit. But
they like it for that smooth stunt, that smooth bark,
which like the fucking diasporos text aina our native Texas
per simmon gets that same smooth bark and looks way
cooler and will grow out of fucking rock walls like
I've seen them growing out of rock walls in a
limestone canyon in Sanderson, you know, Texas per simma with
with edible fruit too, for whatever. If you give a
shit about that, is it edible? Is it edible or medicinal?
Can I can I eat it? Can I put it
in my mouth and not die? I don't know who cares,
but yes you can. In this case, it's just such
a cooler play. They got a cooler pollination biology. The
flowers are unisexual, so it promotes out crossing it just
you know. But uh, but that doesn't get planted as
much and it takes longer to grow versus the dreadon
crape myrtle. Anyway, Yeah, that is a side that was
a RNT. But but I went to the Carnegie Museum
in Pittsburgh because I fucking love museums, and and I
love especially in the natural history section. Like each I
should do a review of all the natural history museums
across the US. I've been going to museums forever, man,
even when I was still like riding freight trains and shit.
I would still go to the museum. I'd stop in
the city and I'd hit the different museums. Maybe sometimes
the art museum too. That can be nice, but a
little bit different of a crowd there, you know, sometimes
you see art that doesn't look like anything. But the
Natural History Museum is always fucking cool. You always get
a little context. And since natural history is such a
regional thing, or can be such just like local specific thing,
you'll find, you know, every museum, depending on where you are,
we'll have a different exhibit focusing on the local natural
history and geology of that region. And Carnigie Museum was
no different. It was fucking cool. Plus they've got the
art in there too. It's weird. Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh's
like a mixture of art and natural sciences. They had
some nice dinosaurs. I took some pictures for my daughter,
but uh oh yeah, they got a really cool uh
what was it? How fuck ichthyosaur diorama? That was nice.
But they got a whole piece on the history, the
geologic history of Appalachia, which again was formed. If you
look at a terrain map, a topographic layer. There are
these you know, it looks like these wrinkles in the
in the Earth's skin that kind of coincide with the
watchtah orogeny, the watchetah uplift that I was talking about earlier,
which again was the result of continental impact of a
of plate tectonics, of tectonic a convergent tectonic zone, basically Africa,
the continent that was Africa or that is Africa now
ramming in to you know, about three hundred million years ago,
ramming into what is now the US, coming together to
form the super continent Pangaea, and then rifting apart again
one hundred million years later, like maybe like two hundred
million years ago, and that's when the Atlantic actually opened up.
And so that's why you've got and you've got the
same rocks. There's so many geologic affinities between you know, Scotland,
nor Northern Africa, Northwest Africa, Appalachia, Eastern Canada, et cetera.
It's really fucking cool. I saw someone create a map,
it was like a week ago. It was on Instagram
about that showing like the same mountains, the same rocks,
and same rocks and same basically same mountain ranges in
the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and southern Appalachia. They were
the same same there was the same mountain chain at
one point before the Atlantic Ocean opened up, because there's
a rift zone that goes up and down north and
south through the Atlantic Ocean and then comes on board,
comes up, uh, comes onto land around what is that Iceland,
and then goes back down to the ocean, you know,
like the seam of a baseball. So yeah, it was
in yeah, like parts of Norway where like there's geologic
affinities between Norway and Canada, northern eastern northeastern Canada too. Yeah,
it's fucking cool to see. But so it's an old
mountain chain. But basically that's why the up lift happened
in the first place. That's why you had that that
you know, throw rug on a on a hardwood floor
thing going on, you know, throw rug bunched up against
the door jam on a hardwood floor like an accordion.
Really cool. So and another thing they had too, which
was nice was they had like a map of the
state of Pennsylvania and it showed the difference you know,
there's a difference in relief in the type of mountains
that you get in northern Pennsylvania versus southern Pennsylvania, Central
and eastern Pennsylvania in the north and in the south.
And it's because you know, and if you look at it,
you could tell they had it was a really cool,
uh picture the mountain. The way that the mountains are
sculpted looks different. They're much more wider valleys between the
mountains and the north. The mountain ridges, you know, because
you've got all these parallel mountain ranges. Basically, those are
all the folds from when you know, Africa rammed up
into the east northwest, Africa rammed up into the east
coast three hundred and twenty million years ago, whenever it
was creating the uplifting the Wachita Mountains and uplifting Appalachia,
and so those folds, you know, just like imagine a rug,
you know, bunched up against the door jam. You're pushing
it from one end. It's on a hardwood floor, and
it starts bunching up folding. All those folds trend the
like the ridges go you know, northeast to southwest and
then and then they kind of bunch up going towards
the north, well, the northern end in between those ridges,
the valleys are a lot broader. They're like U shaped almost,
and there they've been worn down a lot. It's because
the glaciers. It's because of the glaciation, and you could
see it. It's very vivid. It's like a very vivid change.
If you look on you can kind of see it.
If you look at a geologic map, like if you
go to Google Maps and put it in terrain layry,
you could see where the glaciation stopped, like basically right
at Interstate ninety nine, which runs you know, southwest to northeast.
It goes through lt Tuna up through Bellafonte and State College,
like northwest of that and north of that was where
the glaciers were, and they just carved the shit out
of the landscape. Like you can see a much different
relief and you can see that the glaciers did not
hit the Appalachian Mountains south of State College or south
or east of State College, which is really fucking cool,
and it's something you can't see unless you're like looking
at the terrain. You know, if you're looking at like
a terrain map, then it becomes really obvious. You're like,
oh but uh oh, man, it just gets great. I
didn't know. I'm I'm so unfamiliar with this region. I've
got so much more exploring left to do, which is
like also looking to get out of the United States
because it could be such a tox successful at times.
But it's nice to, you know, I have a little
bit of context for the geology and the rocks because
that dictates so much other shit that's going on on
the surface. It's really really fun stuff to see. The
fucking I highly recommend the Carnegie Museum if you get
a chance to go there, and I got like a
The do reciprocal admission too, so I have membership with
the museum here in South Texas, which is just a
small little museum, but have membership with them gets me
gets me into the Carnegie for free, which I you know,
I thought was pretty nice. So anyway, man, the fucking
giants Cicatas are out. I did a video on them
three days ago. It should be up in a week
or two. But god, they're so They're so annoying. I
love them, They're so amazing. It's just it's the most
I've put them on. I've played them on here before
I'll play them again where you could just go watch
the video. But it's the most obnoxious insect in North America, absolutely,
one hundred and ten percent. It's fucking hilarious, and it
starts out it's just like I mean, if you think
the ones, if you think the seventeen year ones in
Chicago in the Midwest are bad, you got to hear
the giants. There's botanists I know down here who can't
stand them, like they give visibly upset hearing this insect.
It makes me so happy. I think it's because I
just think it's hilarious. You know, anything that's harmless and
able to irritate the shit out of people to that extent,
Oh my god, irritate the shit out of human beings
that extent is my seal of approval. So I was
out filming them the other There's not a lot you'll
hear them sporadically here because so much of the habitat
has been destroyed. They need the misky trees, miskeat and
huisace huisace Is Vicelia pharnesiana. It's another mimosoid legumes, so
it's in the mimosoid mimo soid e subfamily, just like
you know mis gait and Senegelia bolandurai, the guahio. Another
great fucking tree Epinopsis the Texas ebony et cetera. But
it's primarily nel Tuma glandulosa aka Prosopis glandulosa and Vicelia
pharnisiana the aka huisace that these things are eating the
roots of and living off of. And I guess they've
got a four year cycle, so they're on the ground
for four years and they up. But the cult of
the lawn is so big down here. I bet people
are spraying all kinds of shit they smell they sell
that fucking insect fogger down here? Do they sell that it?
Someone should just go vandalize that stuff at home, despot,
like they sell like crates of this shit at the
big box stores. It's crazy, man, It's like you're just
gonna poison the fucking like, especially the more I've gotten
into bugs, especially because my kid really likes them, Like,
you're just gonna spray this insect fogger. That's so fucking gnarly, man,
That's like, it's so obscene. You're just gonna kill everything.
Not to mention shit for brand, because you're killing all
the cool stuff, like the dragonflies that will eat you know,
all the other quote pesky insects. You're killing the spiders too.
I got this big ass tropical orb weaver that sets
up shop every night, sometimes right in my path, and
so I end up walking into her. But she's you know,
like the size of a golf ball, big red, beautiful
pattern on her body. She's like a like a pinkish
like a brick, like a pinkish mauve brick color. But yeah,
we get the tropical war weavers down here, and it's
kind of jolting at first, but she's you know, she's harmless,
she's not gonna bite you, still wanting to do with you.
But she's always out there catching moths and other insects
that walk into her little web. I was killing mosquitos
with the electric tennis racket. It's so fun. I kill
like six a day. They're tiny, they're eighties at jipdi.
They've got really fuzzy antenna. You can see them under
a microscope. And yeah, and so I will kill him
and then feed them to the pinkwicula. This company called
beaver Lab, which is based out of China sent me
a microscope. They wrote me on Instagram and they were like,
if we send you this microscope, will you do a
video for us? And I said yes, but only because
I wanted the free microscope. I didn't really think I
was gonna end up doing a video. But then when
I actually looked at this thing, it's cool. It's like
a microscope with a screen and you can take photo
and video, so it's like a It's like a microscope
that you could take phone pictures with without having hold
your phone up to the eyepiece of the mic. It's
really fucking cool. And it comes with slides and cover
slips and little collection jars, and it's like meant for
being used with kids too, because it's got It comes
with like a little booklet like the one I the
one I got I read with my daughter at night,
the one they sent us. It's got little drawings of
like tartar grades and shit in there. But I was
so impressed because it was cool, I was like, all right,
I'll do a fucking video. I can incorporate this. I mean,
I ended up incorporating into a video just because I
ended up actually using it to look at something that
I was doing a video on I did a video
on growing So Tall from seed That'ssilerian because man, there's
just there's one of the plays I did to talk
at was this this So Tall distillery, and I didn't
meet anyone there. I'm sure they'll probably find people, but
it just still sketches me out. And everyone I've mentioned
growing so Tall too, it's they're always like, like anybody
who's a plant person, they're not growing so tall, but
the so tall booze, you know, because you can make
a booze out of soult, just like you make a
booze out of a got. Any of the local Texas
plant people I mentioned it too are kind of doing that.
They're like, oh shit, that sounds kind of sketchy. And
it's totally unsustainable because they're not farming this stuff. They're
not actively growing it. It takes twenty years to reach
the stage at which you can harvest it. So they're
going they're just going out the habitat and whacking it,
you know, just fucking by the bushelful. And you know, yeah,
there's a lot, and they got permission. It's fucking private property.
Whatever cares if it's private property it's I mean, you know,
my feelings not all that. It's yeah, it's cool. The
landowner is okay with you taking it. What about all
the other things that live there and depend on it?
Are they all right with it? You know, you're like
you're stealing from the fucking biosphere and not replenishing, or
you're taking and not giving back. That's all so I was.
But you know, I'm not trying to like take the
shaming route with them. I just want to encourage more dialogue,
more of a come. We're just going to talk about
more of a conversation what they say. We're just want
to make it a converse. I just want people, I
just want to talk about more like oh, this shit,
actually you do need to be growing this, you do
need to be giving back, Like it's kind of fucked
up to just be, you know, taking bushels of this stuff,
this plant that's an essential in habitat. You know, however
often they're doing it and not not replanting it or
growing more like if anything, like just for your own
pr so you don't look like, you know, it's like
totally like cynical American capitalist view, like just just do
it for your pr you don't actually need to do
any but at least make it look like it. But seriously,
you know, at least grow it whatever, because that's theilirium.
It's super easy to grow from seed too, so it
all is. I've grown it so many times. It's just
you sew it. You sew the seeds, you collect. You
can collect the shit ton of seeds. When the things
are flowering and fall the big flower spike, the wooden,
you know, gets upwards of like fucking I don't know,
twelve feet tall. I'll cut that wooden stalk off. It's
not what it's you know, it's not like true secondary growth.
It's a monocop. But it's it feels like what it is,
like a cane, can you know, beat your your friends
with it whatever. Use it as a walking stick. I
use mine to flip the futon mattress in the back
of my truck up when I'm done, like I just
like use it as like a poker to push it back.
But but you know, you collect the seed, you sew it.
It's it doesn't need any there's no hot shit you
have to do to Germany. You don't need to stratify it,
no treatment, nothing, you just sew it and just let
it go. And uh, it takes a while to get going,
but you know, and you pot it up I mean
in the ground as best, but you pot it up
and keep the competition away so it can get enough light.
It needs the full sun and it gets going. It's fine.
It's really easy to grow, and it's a beautiful fucking plant.
Desillarian is a cool genus. You get Desialirian longesimum and quadranguletam,
the coalescent ones down in Mexico, there's a couple other
coalescent ones. By coalescent, I mean it like gets a stalk,
so it ends up looking like a trufula tree, you
know from the lower kind of like a stalked sodaal.
But uh, text saynum that's lear and text aynum and
Leo phylum and wheel right do not they're they're a
cal a, isn't They don't form a trunk. But it's
a great fucking planet, So I may not love it.
It's a great you know, new New World desert plants,
so I just would love to see more people growing.
It's related to Bocarnia, uh and Nolina, which are also
really fucking cool. They're in that whole tribe No Nolinee
from in the subfamily Nolanoidy. But Nolanoidy is like, it's
all this asparagacy text on me. It's a fucking nightmare.
The APG fucked it up so bad and made it
so much more confusing than it needs to be. They
should have kept all those subfamilies as their own independent families,
but it's it's yeah, it's subfamily Nolinoidy. And then tribe Nolini,
and Nolini has Bocarnia, which are the giant the quote
ponytail palms. They're not a poem, but that's what they
call them, ponytail palms. They're like another you can get
them in like the home depot garden center as like
a house plant. But they get big as fuck. Their
native to Puebla, Puebla in southern Mexico. It's really fucking
cool genus. Some of them get huge, big bulbous trunk
looks like a swollen base, like a like a upside
down light bulb kind of and uh. And then no Lina,
there's a ton of No Lina. We get cool Nolina's
in Texas. You get Nolina. What is it Perry, I
Palmer Perry, I some dead honky I don't know. And
uh and you get those in the Mohave Desert and
the Kingston Range, et cetera and other places. But yeah,
so but anyway, I but I was doing this video
on that and I found I was looking at the
soil the sand grains that I was using for the
soil mix, and I ended up using the microscope that
these people sent me. Anyway, so it worked there. Fine.
Now I'm trying to get another microscope out of them.
Normally we charge for these for these VIDs. But you know,
since they approached me and I was originally intending on
scamming them first, just taking the product and not doing
any video, I cut them some slack. You know, Hey, Lisapel,
you throw me another one of those microscopes. We could
work something out, you know better yet, just tell me
when the truck is coming with the palette. No, I'm
just kidding. I'm sorry. So uh yeah, anyway, that was
but that was fucking great. And then I forgot to
mention when we were in Chicago, Urban Rivers, which is
that organization that's building those floating rafts with all the
cool native plant habitat on it. In Chicago when we
were there, they were having like some anniversary they blew up.
They got really popular. They had like a big street fest.
People were coming by. They're planting more more of those,
They're they're throwing more of those rafts in the Chicago River.
They throw these floating rafts and they plant all these
native plants like Hibiscus, mushodos and I mean, you know,
plants that can tolerate very wet sites, like wet prairies
or swamps. But there's a lot of there's a decent
list of species that fit that profile that are native
to the Chicago region, and they plant those on these
floating rafts in the river, which is fucking It's still
so mind blowing to me, Like that river used to
be so gnarly, man. I've almost fallen in it a
couple of times, painting graffiti, breaking into abandoned buildings, fucking
around as a kid, you know, doing whatever. I remember
once I got chased by crackheads after I was painting
this building on Where was it was? Unholsted? Fuck? Where
was it? Maybe it was the south end of Goose Island.
I can't remember, but these crackheads saw me painting some shit.
They were smoking crack under this bridge and saw me
painting this building, and I had to walk by him
on my way out under this bridge, and they were like, hey, hey,
you know, we're gonna call the police if you don't
if you don't give us forty bucks, we're gonna call
the police. And I didn't have any money at all.
I was like, first off, I don't have any money. Second,
you're not gonna do like They're not gonna call the
fucking cops. You're gonna smoke a crack under a bridge.
They were just trying to get money money off me,
which is obvious, which is funny too. It's like, man,
you see some like you see some derely kid painting graffiti,
He's probably not the one that you're gonna hit the
jackpie with if you try to get money out of him.
But I basically I forget how it went, but I
what exactly went done. But they tried to get money
off me, and I was like, yo, fuck you, and
I ran the other way. But you had to go
under this bridge, this viaduct to get out. That was
a way, the only way to get back to the street,
like Street Act says. So I ended up running the
other way, which was directly towards the river and having
to like it was a chain link fence topped with
razor wire along the Chicago River, and I had but
with nothing beneath it, there was nothing to stand on.
So I was basically just like spider manning it laterally
across this fence that was held up over the river.
Oh fuck, it was so it was so gnarly. I
can't even remember the spot that I was painting either. God.
I was going through old photos at my mom's house
the other day looking at looking at like photos from
back in that time period of my life. There's like shit,
I don't even remember. There's photos of it of that
those times, and I'm in them, but I forget. I
don't even have recollection of it, which is kind of
spooky and like things that I paint that I don't
have recollection, but anyway I have it. I ended up
having a spider man on this chain link fence, like
just sticking my toes in the holes and holding on
with my hands my fingers through the chain link and
moving laterally across this fence to get away from these crackheads,
because yeah, there were like four or five of them, man,
And I ended up being fine, and I hid in
some tow yard. That's what the fence was too. It
was for a towing yard, and I ended up hid
hiding in the towing yard. It was like a towing
or auto wreckers yard. And damn there where dogs are too.
I don't know, I forget it either way. I made
it back to the street, to street level, back up
the street level, and I was fine because the streets
above the river. But uh but I remember that I
was thinking back and after that happened, and I was like, man,
I almost fell in the fucking Chicago River. That's gnarly
as hell. It is. So it is like it had
a smell to it, you know, it was like a
bacteria smell or algae smell that it was like probably
the only species of algae that could exist in that
toxic as gnarly wall her you know. But now it's
like the water is actually relatively clean. They have fresh
water muscles that they're growing in it. Granted the muscles
are hanging from a box, uh, so they don't get
eaten by the muskrats. Louie killed a muskrat a year ago,
and they brought that up. She's she's never killed shit,
She's only killed street rats before. She chases cats all
the time. I let her do that if they're not
like pet cats, if they're just farrels, And I let her.
It's good for the cats, you know, and for the
things that the cats try to kill. Uh. But she
she broke off and went and attacked this fucking musk.
I was so pissed, you know, if anything, because it
made us look bad and it's the only time she's
done that. I was so And they brought that up,
you know, they were bringing they were digging that back up,
like they're like, because of Louie, we have a lot,
we have a rule now. But uh, they were just
kind of joking. I think actually the person who said
it probably didn't like me. But you know, regardless, it
wasn't it wasn't an issue. Louis was a she was
a bad dog. But they have to use it. They
actually have to use a dog on that dock anyway
to keep the Canada geese. The Canada geese in Chicago
are fucking oh my god, they get wild. You know.
It's one of those those birds whose populations have probably explode,
exploded because they thrive off of human off of human development.
But anyway, so urban rivers was, yeah, they were. They
were building more native planet docks. It's so nice, man,
it's such a nice little spot. And it gets like
the growth there. You know, you'll be there in March
when nothing started to grow yet, and then you go
in June or July and it's a thicket. It's like
a it's a sound bearer. You can't see through it
or over it. It gets up like four or five
feet tall, six feet tall. It's really dense. You know.
All that prairie shit, all the prairie shit too, is
the same way in that reason, Like it goes from
there being nothing there to getting upwards a six or
seven feet tall and just being the dense thicket by
the end of August. But then the span of three
or four months you have this massive eruption of biomass.
It's so nice, it was. It's always so nice to
go through the prairie too. God, I was fucking loving it.
You know, all the singing insects. You know what I
noticed too, is the sound of those Katie DIDs is
what is it? Fucking it's like, and they come out
at night and their way up in the trees. I
don't even know what species that is, but I was
in Saint Louis and I was in there all over Chicago.
It's it's really pleasant. I love the sound of the
singing insects. It's like a psychedelic almost. That's why I
loved cicadas too. It's like a fucking psychedelic experience. There
was a cicada species I heard in a cactus forest
in southeastern Wahaka near the border with Chiappas years ago,
and I remember being in this cactus forest and just
being intoxicated with the sound of these things. It was
so fucking cool. I recorded some video of it. It
was before I was really doing videos, so it's just
the video of the sound. There's it's kind of nice.
I'm not talking in it at all, but it was
a yeah, and there's all kinds of cool dry land
bermeliads all over the ground, hectia and there's tulansai recravata
on everything, and it was neo bus bombia and nuda
which is now cephalos serious noudah. But uh, these big
green totem poles. They're like these you know, tall columnar
cacta that don't really branch, and if they do branch,
the arms stay really close to the main stem. Oh god,
but yeah, what cicada species was that? But they were
fucking it was a cacophony. It was so loud and wonderful.
And so when I did this video on the giant cicadas,
that's what it sounded like. Was you know, it was
a different call obviously because it's a different species of cicada,
but it's permeating everything. It's everywhere, and it was dark out.
It was at my friend's house. She's got like sixty
maybe thirty acres, I don't know, and it's like, you know,
becoming the only island of hap with that. If you're
looking at a satellite map, it's the only green island
around it. They just okay to another housing development behind
their house, which is depressing as fuck. You know, it's
a spot where there had been a farm and a
house and now it's gonna be like, you know, eighty
McMansions for phrases, and people that want the shiny shit,
lay masses that want the shiny shit, you know, Yeah,
sure they're nice, they're fucking whatever, you know, whatever. No,
it's you, no to each their own what. It's fucking lame.
It sucks. It's like that. Lifestyle sucks. The shiny shit sucks.
The fucking value system is poisonous as fuck. It's empty,
it's disconnected from anything real and alive. It's just a
fucking fucking boring drag man, you know, all concerned with status,
with you know, impressing your fucking fellow social primates, needing
validation from them for the for your lawn or your
nice car or whatever. Stupid shit. It's just fucking you know,
more bottom of the brain stem shit, lowest common denominator shit.
But there was a car, a car sitting on this
miscuit when I was filming during the day. I was
there during the day, and then I went back at
night because they were louder at night. The cicadas are
loud at night, they're actually singing. But there was a car,
a car when I was there during the day, I
was looking at them across this canal, and he was
just sitting there near this pile of garbage where they
demolished the house and also pushed up bulldozed all the
all the vegetation, and he was just looking for shit
to eat, probably looking for like little lizards or fucking
road and scurrying whatever. Car cars are so cool. How
far north did they go in at Texas? You get
them in Austin, I don't know, probably anyway, but yeah,
the cicada thing was fucking cool. I'm stoked about that.
Video came out really nice. There Caesada gigas, the giant cicada.
They go all the way down into northern Argentina. I
was hearing them because their call is unmistakable. It's so
incredibly annoying. Their call was in Carreto and Guanajuato when
I was there, and the huisace trees above this small
little canyon where the lafaffred, the fusa and the Strombo
cactus was Yeah, God damn. I love them so much.
It's crazy how much joy it fills me with. And
they're just hilarious. They're these weird, harmless bugs. My daughter
was playing with them. They're huge, they're like green and
these beautiful colors. And there were American snout butterflies out
that night too. They had just all been passing through
migrating south, like, it's so fucking cool paying attention to bugs. Now,
I used to never care, never care, wouldn't give it
a second thought unless it looked really weird, and even
then I wouldn't. Now I'm like, oh God, what is
it do in the ecosystem? Is it eating something? Is
it pollinating something? Is it you know, is it using
something as a host plant? Is it living in the ground,
is it living in water? What does it do? You know?
It's like, that's the shit I asked when I meet
a new organism. It's not can I put it in
my mouth and not die? It's just, oh God, that
drives me nuts. I put out a I wrote a
tweet about that today on x on elon musk x
fucking weirdo, fucking rich freak. But I put a tweet
about that today, and uh it was funny. It was
just it was this long tweet. Oh yeah, you know what,
I'll read it to you right now. Okay, here we go.
It was, uh yeah. I look forward to the day
when I hear a lay person learn what a new
plant is and not ask what does it do? Is
it medicinal or edible? The concept of every species in
the biosphere is a vital piece of a living machine
that sustains all of life on Earth. Should be taught
early on. I think like first grade is a good
good time to start. This is more than just corny,
cliched ear candy. The more you learn about every bit
of the living world around you, the more fascinating. Everything
becomes a dense web of connections. Plants, pollinators, dispersers, decomposer's insects, fungi, protus, bacteria,
or keia. Accumulate enough experiences and what remains of the
living world outside of human asphalt and concrete, and this
notion becomes something that underpins an understanding of your own
existence of this world and your slash are irrefutable membership
in and responsibility to it, and that that as innocuous
as that is, still found a fucking way to trigger
someone to write a shitty company, to write a ship.
I had to block some dude after writing this. He
was in he was in Britain. He was He was
like a smarmy British guy, probably with probably a rich kid.
It sounded like, because you can only talk, you can
only behave that condescending and smug to someone if you've
never been popped in the face for actually talking like
that to someone, you know what I mean, like the
people that or you have to have something that's insulating you,
whether it's wealth or you just don't go outside or whatever.
But this guy responded to this. I'm not even gonna
read his response. I have to dig through a bunch
of shit to find it. And he said he was
like smarmy as fuck to someone else too, like some
like innocent guy to comment that he was just you know,
I forget what he said, but it was like harmless
with this guy, this guy that he responded to comment anyway,
but the guy was just smug in a fucking dick,
And I ended up comming to the guy. I was like, man,
you know you're like you probably find a way to
fucking sound the meaning and condescending if you're talking in
your sleep, like how do you not like read the room,
like you don't need to say it, Like you could
be nice, you could fucking whatever. So anyway, he just
he was some at one point too, I said, and
this is kind of funny. I was like he because
he was making it so he was doing like the
poor me thing, like oh, I didn't, you know, the
guy was like an obvious prick, and he sounded like
this a number of times. There were other times he
left something social media's is to fucking toilet in Twitter especially,
of course, But there were other times he had said
something and I was like, oh God, like what is this?
The fuck is this guy? I'm just gonna know, like
it's kind of a dick thing that he the way
that he put it, but maybe he just doesn't, you know.
And then there were other times where it was like, Okay,
this guy's being a fucking schmuck. So after five times,
I was just like I said something and I was like,
you know, can you just fucking stuff, like learn some manners,
take your fucking meds. I don't know what it is,
you know, And he had said I forget what he said.
I actually have to look at this. Hold on. Yeah,
that's what it was. I said something. I said something
in response to someone else, like just answering the question
someone had, and uh, you know, I think it was
about whether something's edible. And I was like, yeah, some
of the last thing I ask not really interested. But
you can generally make assumptions. Don't put anything in your
mouth without knowing what something is down a species level ID.
But you can generally make assumptions because certain plant families,
like a post ace, you know, have have chemical synapomorphies.
They certain plant families are known for heaven, for producing
toxic stuff renunculecs, one of them a post and ac.
There's exceptions in every family. There's a lot of members
of the Carrett family like poison, hemlock, water hemlock, uh
coneum meculatum is I think that's his emmaculatum anyway? Uh,
that produced very toxic compounds like ferano kumer. In secondary
chemistry you also get that and rue tasy, but it's
rut tasy. I don't think is jenny generally toxic? But anyway,
there's chemical similarities between various plants and a certain family,
et cetera. And he said something that was just so
fucking smug, And I was like, look, man, why are
you Why do you sound like like, why are you
saying it like that? Can you not that sounds condescending
as fuck? This is like the And he was like,
he responded with I'm just disagreeing with you. It was like, no,
you're not disagreement, you're being kind of a dick, like
can you say it differently? You know? And then he
was like, are you just used to people not arguing
with you? And I was like, people argue with me
all the fucking time. I grew up arguing. I'm a
fucking wop. I lived in a fan like I lived
in a household where people were screaming at each other
one week and then the next week they'd be fine,
playing cards together whatever. Like, it's not that you're arguing,
you're being a fucking dick, like, and then I made
the comment, I was like, what are you fucking autistic
or something? You can't read the room? And then he responded,
which is, you know, I'm probably fucking autistic. I'm I
diagnosed add I'm a fucking nut. But I uh, but
he he did this pearl clutching shit back to me.
He's like, how dare you? You know how petulant? First off?
Who uses words like petulant and you know, accepts accept
some fucking you know, godfree, That's what it's. That's what
it's petulant. Just so petulant. Who calls someone petulant, you know,
like to the you know what I mean, like not
like writing it down, not write like, not like in
a piece of literature, but in a fucking every day
talk who uses words like petulant, like god, shut the
fuck up. Uh. And so anyway, he was, uh, you know,
he's like, what are you? Are you? How dare you
shame people for being neuro atypical? And I was like, oh,
give it a fucking rest, shut up. I'm like, I'm
one to talk. I'm fucking nuts. I'm out of my mind.
To what do you think? I'm like, you think I'm
I of all people, am shaming someone? No, I generally
think that's a trait. Sometimes autistic people can't read the
fucking room and don't know how they're coming off, or
that they sound like a dicky. You're either that or
you're like a rich kid who's never been popped in
the mouth before for talking down to people. Anyway, the
point was, plus he was just British too, which is
I think that's something they do over there. No offense
to anybody in the UK, you know, no offense to
anybody across the pond. I'm just saying I've noticed there's
cultural traits, especially among the wealthy in that country. They
have a way of talking that comes off as very
very snide and condescending. But uh, anyway, I don't even
know why I started talking about this. I just thought
I just think it was funny. And this guy's like
online anyway. I ended up telling him like he's online
all the time, and I telling him I was like, oh, well,
go fucking miss your orchids or something. Body scram get
out of here. You know you're right, time enough internet
for you. If you can't be nice, log off. All right.
You want to like talk about something or or tell
me something I don't know, or or share an anecdote,
go ahead. But many you start talking like that to
me or anyone else, you can go fuck yourself. So
uh anyway, I forget how I got to talking about this,
but it's fucking amusing. Imagine that. It's just crazy the
way people again, the way the way you behave in
a car or online, like anyone does this. It's it's
so far removed from consequences. It's like it's these such
alienating bubbles. You know, the last thing I wanted to
talk about before I step out, because it's been two
hours already, I'm surprised you're even listening. Still. But uh,
the last thing I want to talk about was I
had stopped at Missouri Botanical Garden when I did that
video on the herbarium, which was incredible. It's such a
fucking great spot to lurk. I could have spent I mean,
that's easily That arbarium is easily a place you could
hang out for a week and not be bored. They've
got plants from all over the fucking world. It's so
so incredible. But uh, I don't know if you if
if you've seen the video that I did, there was
the Czardini collection. This this woman Else's Ardini. She was Argentinian.
She was German, but she moved to Argentina. I don't
know what that was about. If it was like, eh,
anytime you get somebody moving from Germany to the you know,
Argentina or Paraguay, mid century, it gets you know, mid
twentieth century gets a little gets a little hairy. You
know they're they're reasoning for doing so. But anyway, but
it was this whole aisle was filled with her specimens
and it was hilarious because every specimen was just smushed
in there, like it was like no preparation was taken
to press this thing in a way that it was preserved,
you know, in a way that you could see it
at all. It was like it was just literally smushed.
It looks like it looked like salad greens. For these
are barium collections, you know, salad greens had just been
smushed in between two pieces of cardboard on like the
front seat of someone's on the set, you know, so
and God, there was so much stuff there, and a
lot of it wasn't idd yet. I mean, it looks
like for me, it was like a horder nightmare because
you've got all this stuff. You can't get rid of it,
because you never know if there might be an undrescribed
species in there is something valuable, But at the same time,
you can't do anything with it. It would require so
much work and time to go through and and sort
it and organize it and figure out what can be identified,
who is going to be able to identify it, et cetera.
It's just, man, it was like giving me a panic
attack looking at the thing. It was kind of funny.
I don't know, I don't know, like if you're going
to put all that time. There were like sixty thousand
collections sixty thousand vouchers that this lady collected that were
never will probably never be mounted, Like they'll never be mounted.
There's no id for a lot of them. There was one,
you know, there was stuff there. Look, I identify a
Perscia while I was there, Like it was obviously Pereskia,
probably pereski a koliata and it had just been labeled.
They see it was you know, it's a vining cactus. Uh,
And it was you know, there was I guess there
was decent data on it, but it was just fucking
just smashed them between these two pieces of cardboard and
thrown in a folder. And then you know, the whole
this whole corridor was just packed on either side with
old specimens. God damn, It's just like, what's gonna happen,
What's gonna happen there? But uh, but the rest of this,
I mean, the rest of the stuff was just I'd
never really gotten a chance to look at the specimens
there either. It's cool. They've got two different buildings and
all the monocots and some other plant families are in
this other building versus the one that I started off filming,
and that's the one that I ended up going to
with Peter Burnhert later and looking up Belowzia's such a
cool genus. Ended up looking up belowsias and hanging around.
And plus you don't time to go to the urbarium.
There's always cool stuff on the walls, cool posters, cool stuff.
It's just a nice place to lurk and hang out,
you know. So uh yeah, I don't know. I think
you can go there by appointment. You have to schedule it.
And definitely if you're you know, a research you're affiliated
with some institution, you can do it. You just have
to schedulely, have to reach out to someone at Missouri
Botanic Garden. But I didn't realize, man, they had seven
million specimens there. That's fucking crazy. It's right up there
with New York Botanica Garden too, which is another huge erbarium.
And I've still never been to Shaw Nature Reserve, which
is west of Saint Louis. It's like a little glade
they've got they've got some native stuff, there's some that's
I guess, there's some parts of it that are a restoration,
and there's other areas that are like the glade areas
are We're never demolished in the first place. I might
be fucking that up. I might be totally wrong, but yeah,
they've got some really cool plants there. I know, the
these whole this whole section of the country again. I
just it's it's it's been overlooked. I haven't spent much
time there, and there's like big it's like a big
blank spot on the map for me, you know, like
all these other places I've been, I've got, you know,
collections and photographs from these places, you know, all over
the country, but like the north, it's but the Northeast
and the central and a lot of places in the
southeast too, and uh like basically like the holiest coast,
you know, the whole eastern half of the United States.
I got to start spending more time. There's a bunch
of cool shit I want to see in Georgia again. Glades.
I'm really into glades and dry rocky sites and probably bogs.
I could probably do a bog or two, you know,
do get some aquatic stuff. Generally not my thing, though,
I'm much more enthusiastic about the dry sites. See the
coolest evolutionary adaptations there. Anyway, I'll kill it for out,
but Uh. Yeah, I'm gonna be speaking at Cactus Smart. No, No,
I'm not speaking. I'm just gonna have a table selling
some books and shirts and shit like old old T
shirts I gotta gotta unload. I'll probably be selling for cheap.
I'm gonna be speaking at San Antonio Botanical Garden. When
is it the September twenty sixth hole in Okay? Yeah,
I'll be speaking at San Antonio Botanical Garden, giving a
presentation I'm cacked I both from South Texas and South
America on September twenty seventh Friday, September twenty seventh, and
then I'll be at the Oklahoma City Mushroom Fair their
Fungus Festival October twelfth. And there's a slight chance I
might be teaching a class, an enter to botany class
at Sewell Ross University in Alpine, Texas this fall, but
I don't know. I probably shouldn't be doing it because
they've got too much shit going on and I'm burning
the candle at both ends. But it would be really
fun to teach a botany class, and even if I
can get one student to change their major from fucking
whatever they're doing, whatever they're going at school for it's
not as cool as biology and botany. I guarantee, I
fucking guarantee you that even if I could do that,
I will feel like I will have felt like I
actually did something decent uh with uh with this year.
So anyway, that's all I got for today. There'll be
a bunch of videos coming out the Giants Ciccada when
I'm stoked about. I've still got a whole bunch of
videos to edit from a prairie in Cleveland, a cool
site north of Pittsburgh, uh and that kind of shit.
And then I'm supposed to be finishing up this other
book I'm doing, which is fucking driving me nuts, and
that should be done in November, and then after that
I'll be doing a bunch more international trips and traveling
around looking at plants. I want to go to, uh
some ultramaphic sites in Saba, like northern Borneo. I want
to go back to southern Chile. And I don't know,
if you got a spy you could recommend let me know,
you know, maybe it did. Maybe maybe I'll go to Jordan.
Maybe there's some cool stuff. Go see Jimnrena, that weird
monotypic subfamily of Asta racy. Anyway, that's all. I gotta
have a grocery day, Go fuck it up by H