Even in Kyoto

Yesterday was Baby's First Time getting the annual (bi-annual?) vehicle inspection done. (I am the Baby). Thankfully, the mechanic that S identified for us in Albany could fit that in yesterday, along with an oil change. This mechanic is somewhat old-skool, but in all the best possible ways. I especially appreciate him after visiting so many different mechanics in so many different places in 2024 in the midst of all those road-tripping adventures. It's a relief to learn I don't need to go out and find yet another establishment to tackle yet one more car project. He also had a recommendation for place to ask about auto body rust work that I'd rather pay someone to deal with than try to do myself. It's going to take me longer to get to that task, though.

Based on the car logistics, I rode Princess TinyBike yesterday. I need to figure out a maintenance plan for the Princess soon. She's due for at least new brake pads, which are of a particular sort since the Princess is a Brompton. That just means I can't just walk into any bike shop and expect to find components ready and waiting for me. In December I tried to pay a visit to a new bike shop in town, Blue Tulip Bikes, located not that much further from home than the erstwhile Downtube Bicycles. The shop sign and internet both said the shop opened at 10 am on Saturdays, but the shop definitely wasn't open when I arrived a few minutes past 10 on a Saturday, and a street fight that broke out a block away made me think better of lingering around to wait for the shop to open, sigh.

So, I'm not yet sure what my target destination will be for Brompton components and repair. Annoying. My next stop will be a small shop in Troy. We shall see. I'm highly motivated to get the Princess in tip-top shape so annikusrex can ride her up to Montreal with me in June.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday evening I rode Frodo home (as usual) in a light drizzle, and when I got home, I was amazed to discover just how much sand now coated my feet, panniers, and bike. I got my footwear and panniers rinsed off promptly, but forgot I'd need to do the bike also until I was about to head out to campus this morning. The grime removal itself went fine, but I forgot to factor in that water applied to surfaces will freeze when the air temperature is 17 degrees F. That mostly just affected my shifting. Thankfully, by the time I was ready to leave campus for home, things had had enough time to thaw out and dry such that shifting function was fully restored.

All of which is to say, winter bike maintenance is a PROJECT.

Just so I can try and remember this for later:



The Cabot cheese were the most smooth out of the lot. The Land O Lakes had a distinct twang to it. The Tillamook had something of a nutty flavor, somehow simultaneously creamy-crumbly. I tend to get sharp rather than extra sharp when I'm shopping for Tillamook; at this point I'd view the Cabot extra sharp as a fine substitute. It isn't the same thing, but it's fine. These are not gourmet specialty cheeses, they are cheeses to be put on tortilla chips to make nachos and on bread to make grilled cheese sandwiches. And sometimes, mac n cheese.

I don't know that I have a coherent weekend report, but I did take some photos. ( so here we go... )

It's a little hard to believe it was just a week ago that I was up in Herland Forest with my mom and brother, visiting my dad's grave.

The morning after, we headed towards Portland for the SICB meeting. There was no reason to hurry to Portland, so we made several stops along the way, ostensibly so my brother could look for swans, but also to satisfy our curiosity about roadside attractions along the Columbia River. My mom remarked that she enjoyed traveling with us as adults, based on our willingness to make stops to satisfy our curiosity.



So that's how we wound up at the Bonneville Fish Hatchery.



The highlight of the fish hatchery was the white sturgeon ponds. Prior to visiting the ponds, my knowledge of sturgeon was limited to an awareness that there used to be a lot of sturgeon in the Hudson River (Atlantic sturgeon), but there aren't many anymore due to historic overfishing. And that they are large and prehistoric.

The sturgeon ponds had a nice viewing house so I could appreciate the sturgeon more easily:





But the above photo doesn't give you a proper sense of scale. Let me try again.













After I posted one of these photos on social media elsewhere, annikusrex shared an article with me about efforts by the Yakima Nation to restore and sustain white sturgeon populations in the Columbia.

It sounds like a major uphill battle, but on the other hand this type of undertaking gives me a certain amount of hope for the future. There are people willing to commit to the long, hard, slow, expensive work of restoring their homelands and traditional livelihoods. I also never knew that sturgeon are prized as a source for caviar. And that sturgeon eggs can be harvested catch-and-release style. That might actually make me inclined to try caviar at some point.

The hatchery visit made me curious about what's happening on the hatchery/restoration front for the Atlantic Sturgeon. Wikipedia says Atlantic sturgeon are generally threatened across the four major ecoregions where they're found. I was also able to find information about some of the fish hatcheries in New York, including one in Warren County. But it appears that, at present, there is only a single hatchery focused on Atlantic sturgeon on the Eastern Seaboard, located in North Carolina or thereabouts.

I can't say I'm all that surprised, even if I am disappointed. Much of the sediment in the Hudson is still so polluted that it is unwise to eat fish that live in the river. So, if the Hudson River fish can't be eaten, the main focus for fish hatcheries is more likely on sport fishing and stocking lakes and ponds. Beyond that, it sure looks like sturgeon are challenging fish to rear based on their size and longevity, and they may not have an East Coast Yakima Nation equivalent, for all I know.

There was one last odd coincidence, in all of this learning about sturgeon. Apparently there's a Columbia Riverkeeper organization, completely unrelated to Hudson Riverkeeper? That just makes me wonder how the organizations compare with respect to the scope of the work they do. I'm not particularly involved in the Hudson Riverkeeper, mostly because most of that organization's focus is on downstream portions of the river. Don't get me wrong - there are a lot of items in need of attention downriver. It's just that very little is happening along the section of river between Troy and Hudson.

Based on the existence of the Tillamook store inside the Portland airport, I must not be the only person with a tendency to smuggle a loaf of cheese home with me at the end of travels to the West Coast.



The cats were very happy to see me, unsurprisingly.



I was up before 3 PST to catch the train to the PDX airport; hopefully that helps with jet lag.

Do any of you happen to know what sort of office supply the sculpture on the left of this photo is supposed to be depicting?



Incidentally, Powell's, from the other day.

The speaker for the first evening plenary of this conference was a person named Jessica Hernandez, and centered on connections between Western scientific understanding and indigenous science/ways of knowing. It was quite interesting with respect to some of the questions I've mentioned here in the past, about frameworks for teaching about Biology, but it's going to take me a little while to digest and articulate what I might do differently in light of what I heard about from the talk (the main element that stuck with me was an alternate presentation of the context of Western science among other factors that affect how we think about and interact with the world around us and more broadly - a spiderweb analogy). Anyway, this is a complex topic to talk about in the midst of current culture wars.

But there was another element of the talk that caught my attention: Hernandez began the talk by talking about her father, who survived what she described as a genocide that occurred during the civil war in El Salvador. I'm not sure I'd heard the Salvadoran civil war described in those terms before, but now it seems to me I should probably spend more time learning more (I think it's this?). What I DO know is that her father is from the part of El Salvador that I got to visit in 1995, where a lot of people wound up fleeing to Guatemala to avoid violent conflict during more intense phases of the war, and where resettlement after the war posed a new series of challenges for everyone.

At the end of the talk, an audience member asked an interesting question: (this is a scientific meeting, so the audience is full of people who identify as scientists) as scientists, we're generally highly aware of how climate change is displacing people in greater numbers and in newer ways than in the past. How will this displacement from traditional homelands affect this context of indigenous thinking and ways of knowing?

This is obviously a hard question without a simple answer; I'm only going to kind of obliquely talk about it. One other element of indigenous science that Hernandez commented on was how, for a while, people were adopting the terminology of "Traditional Ecological Knowledge" as a way of acknowledging indigenous contributions to scientific understanding. However, she noted that the phrasing has caused some people to hyperfixate on the word "Traditional," which pushes a particular and problematic historical view on indigenous understanding. In contrast, indigenous cultures across the globe are living cultures that change through time and in response to changes in the world, and there are tons of examples of that. So she is now using the term "indigenous science" to characterize ways of knowing things about how the world works based on deep/long-term observation and relational thinking. This can therefore include more long-term insights from long-term observation, but also respect the experiences and perspectives of people who relocate/are relocated.

I have a feeling that people who like to keep science in a tidy box will find lots of things to quibble over in all of this. (and I won't claim to have done the best possible job of characterizing what I heard about, in any case!).

My main personal takeaway, especially as someone who has moved around a lot, is that I need to be more deliberate about learning more about the immediate environment around where I live and work, because for all the cases where Western science focuses on generalizability on a global scale, it's connections to the local landscape that are the most powerful for individual learning and lived experience. And that's important for me both as an individual and as a teacher.

Out of all the places for conferences, there's a lot I appreciate about Portland and its convention center. Everywhere there are thoughtful, conservation-oriented efforts: coffee service always uses reusable cups, there is a vending machine with reusable water bottles (and bottle filling stations at the drinking fountains), the toilets are the dual-flush type, and there are signs in the bathroom encouraging users to go for the hand dryers over paper towels. There are other touches, too, like desk nook stations set up for perching between talks, and a pod station for breastfeeding needs. The conference organizers also contribute to the atmosphere by doing things like providing a quiet room and childcare. In their presentation guidelines, they include helpful information on how to make presentations more universally accessible, and this year they have some form of closed-captioning system going, too.

I also still like the hostel where I'm staying (Portland Hostel). I believe it used to be part of the Hosteling International network, but that seems to have been dropped at some point. Since I only ever come to Portland sporadically, the changes that have occurred at the hostel seem fairly dramatic. This hostel used to occupy a cluster of houses, with the corner lot as a parking lot. Between my last visit and this one, they went ahead with a plan to build up that corner lot into the main hostel building, which now houses the reception desk, a cafe, and a community space beneath floors of dorm rooms. The community space has been quite busy over the last two days with musical performances and some sort of private scrapbook/crafting event. The hostel grounds still house some nice outdoors spaces between the buildings, too.

There have been some disappointments. The dorm rooms in the new building are very similar to hostel dorms everywhere; we are packed in like sardines. But that's what you get, for hostel prices! If I come back I will definitely spring for a private room instead. Our dorm room is directly above the cafe, which meant on the first night we had cigarette smoke wafting up. And while the newer kitchen space is workable, it's in a basement and generally less pleasant than the prior kitchen arrangement.

And some aspects of Portland are either the same or worse than before: there are clearly still a lot of homeless folks everywhere, and the area immediately around the Convention Center is a depauperate dead zone with few shops or restaurants within easy walking distance. Definitely feels like there have been casualties of the pandemic.

The one grocery co-op in town apparently permanently closed not too long ago, and prices at grocery stores and coffeeshops here are inflated beyond what I saw in Seattle. A $6+ latte feels steep. I also had my first experience of the grocery store-within-a-store at a Safeway: all of the products that sellers have identified as retail theft targets are now housed in a boxed-off portion of the store interior, with its own separate cashier (baby food, pharmaceuticals, etc). To be sure, this arrangement is less obnoxious than the various passive baffles that retailers had been testing out (speak not of wage theft!). Still - what a depressing shopping experience.

Amidst the wintry gloom and rain, there are lovely moments, like when I stepped off the bus and got to watch the culmination of this rainbow during an evening Gathering of the Crows!



It's funny, though. I don't have a ton of reasons to visit Portland, because it mostly just feels like Seattle's younger sibling, with less to do overall. Still a nice enough spot for a conference, all things considered! And perhaps one of these years I'll find myself back here again at the end of the Seattle-to-Portland bike ride. We'll see.

In general I am relying on smart o phone data while traveling, but it is varying in its cooperation, so this is a high speed, low budget smart o phone post.

Anyway! Several years have elapsed since the last time I stayed at what is now known as the Portland Hostel. In that time they finished building a new central building that houses the front office, a cafe, and a community space. The kitchen is now on the lower level of the original main building. And a grocery coop that I’d remembered has ceased to exist. Grocery prices are definitely jacked up here. Otherwise it’s all all right so far.

I am fighting a sinus/barometer headache, though. Sigh.

I finally finished Ed Yong's book about microbes, I Contain Multitudes, and I'm kind of amused by my personal reaction to the book. The thing is, it's an excellent book, but just for me personally it felt like a bit of a chore to read it. Don't get me wrong, the chapter on lactation was eye-opening and I certainly learned more about microbes such as Wolbachia, it's just that this is a thoroughly-researched popular science book and I'm more often in the trenches. So, if you're microbe-curious, I definitely recommend it, particularly because Yong weaves in some superb metaphors and commentary.

Anyway, I'm on to the next book in the stack already, Let's Move the Needle, by Shannon Downey, subtitled "An Activism Handbook for Artists, Crafters, Creatives, and Makers."

Already there was a helpful section towards the beginning in which Downey defines a series of aspects of activism. This was helpful to me because of some baggage I have around the term "activism" that dates back to reading Galileo's Middle Finger. At one point in GMF, the author questions why an activist chose to keep going with activism, even after achieving the originally outlined activism goals. I can see both perspectives, the "Aren't we done here?" but also the "There's always more work to do." And my sense is that there are a lot of people who wind up clinging very tightly to an identity as an activist, but there are times where that can become really abrasive.

Downey isn't going to resolve those tensions once and for all, but her effort to define different aspects of activism is helpful in this realm. For example, both philanthropy and protest efforts can constitute forms of activism; some activism might be more focused around one or the other or any of a series of other aspects of activism. And Downey also writes specifically about "awareness" activism and how it can feel ineffective and/or performative particularly when an awareness campaign is centered on an issue most people are already aware of (gun violence, to give her example).

And so, I'm optimistic that this will be an interesting book.

Related to this, while I was in Seattle, I naturally picked up the most recent edition of The Stranger, and wound up reading the article about Katie Wilson's win as Seattle's next mayor. What was most interesting about the article was learning about Wilson's background as a community organizer; she honed in on transportation as one of her initial focal issues, and rather than just screaming about what was wanted, put in the time and work to not just advocate for certain things, but to present political leaders with comprehensive draft legislation and ask if they’d be willing to adopt it. This approach is quite different from the approach of a different progressive mayor just elected to head up a large city on the other coast of the USA, who based more of his campaign on charm and charisma and energizing a political base (as best I can tell) rather than on substantive grassroots policy development.

I won’t hazard a guess as to how successful either new Mayor will be in implementing whatever change they think is needed in either city. The contrasts are just interesting. I have a strong preference for substance over posturing.