After two weeks of posting sentimental, smoke-from-the-ears thought-provoking stuff, I thought it was time to throw off the maudlin. Let’s talk about slugs and slime molds.
Quick! What do glaciers, slime molds, and slugs have in common? Quite a lot. In fact, this could be a great parlor game.
The most obvious common bond is that they’re all slow. And yet, they don’t stop moving. Unrelenting, you might say. They’re also a way of Mother Nature making us feel humble. Think you’re all that? Virginia Woolf once said the rock you kick will outlast Shakespeare. Glaciers, slime molds, and slugs will all outlast Shakespeare.
Another common bond is that you can find them all in Alaska, which is where we were touring last week. Alaska is a unique place with large areas of wilderness yet to be discovered as you venture through forests and ocean inlets. It also, therefore, contains many things whose way of existence seems completely alien. You can’t help thinking, how does evolution favor THAT? But the more you learn, the more you realize nature has many ways of propagating itself that we can only guess at. Continue reading “Bridge to Nature: Glaciers, Slime Molds, and Slugs”
The year that my grandparents emigrated is a little fuzzy in my mind. When I worked on the requisite eighth grade Family Tree project forty-some years ago, I seem to recall learning that both grandparents came between 1900 and 1910. There was a wave of Polish immigrants between 1905 and 1910 after the Revolution. Several more waves came at the beginning of the 20th century, as Prussia, Germany, and Russia argued about which of them owned Poland. If the date of my grandparents’ emigration is prior to 1911, they escaped far more strife in their country of origin than whatever hardships occurred here.