The Richness of the Quest

I took a break midway through writing this post, and when I glanced at my Facebook news feed, it contained this quote from Joseph Campbell: "[I]f you follow your bliss, you'll have your bliss whether you have money or not. If you follow money, you may lose the money, and then you don't have even that. The secure way is really the insecure way and the way in which the richness of the quest accumulates is the right way." (courtesy of the Joseph Campbell Foundation).

Thanks for the words of wisdom from beyond the grave, Dr. Campbell. You, sir, are my hero. I'm stealing a bit of your quote for a post title.

A few days ago, Dr. Jon F. Wilkins announced his intention to start up the Ronin Institute, a non-profit research institute for independent scholars. I was immediately very excited by this idea, so I sent him an email asking if there might be a way for me to get involved. He replied positively and inquired about my current status, goals, and plans. What follows is a modified and greatly expanded version of my response, which contains more of my personal backstory than I thought Dr. Wilkins would want to have dumped in his inbox.

I have a B.A. in anthropology from a major university with a respectable department, but at present, I am working as the office girl at a local funeral home (following a miserable stint in college admissions at said university and an enjoyable and rewarding but exhausting stint as an EMS dispatcher, also at said university), and I have been out of graduate school since 2009.

I was already contemplating my escape, in the form of either a semester off or a change of degree program, for a variety of reasons; the singleminded, all-or-nothing focus of the academic department was already wearing thin for me, as I had begun graduate school with two jobs and volunteer commitments as a trainee recovery diver, a SAR technician, and an EMS dispatcher, all of which were either necessary (the jobs) or valued and important (the volunteer gigs) parts of my life, and none of which I was willing to give up to fit in with the all-nautical-archaeology, all-the-time, and-nothing-else-matters culture of my department.

I was, and am, deeply interested in the history of seafaring and captivated by the idea of the physical connection to it offered by archaeology (which, incidentally, I just read a great article about today), but I increasingly balked at the idea of defining my life and my worldview by that and restricting my interests to nothing else.

It also, to be brutally honest, became quite hard to take seriously as a life's work; my classmates' and professors' single-minded focus began to seem sheltered and elitist, especially on the days when I stumbled into class after being up all night sending ambulances to deathly ill or injured people or out all night/weekend/both searching for a missing child who more often than not turned up dead if at all; I could still hear the panicked voices on the other end of the phone, see the bodies floating the in lake and the worried, distraught families huddled at Incident Command- that was the real world, and my classmates knew only their ivory tower, and I began to think of them as naive. I began to see that branch of archaeology as fascinating and fun, something I would like to pursue avocationally, but not something I could dedicate my life to in a serious way after those experiences.

I considered taking a semester off in the fall of 2008 to complete a paramedic's license, having taken the EMT-Basic course concurrent with the end of the spring 2007 semester and the subsequent summer, but I debated and wavered until I ended up sticking with graduate school for another semester. I missed a lot of class (and a lot of my paying job) in the fall of 2008, first putting in long exhausting shifts at EMS helping dispatch ambulances to unload medical evacuees from Houston in advance of first Hurricane Gustav and then Hurricane Ike and ferry them from the DMAT shelter to the local hospitals as needed, and then after Hurricane Ike, out in the field with my SAR team at Bridge City, Crystal Beach, and Anahuac, scrambling over debris and demolished houses searching for the remains of the missing.

That was a pivotal experience in my life, and to this day it's the thing I'm most proud of- not my Cum Laude degree from Texas A&M, not my admission to graduate school, not my involvement in projects while there, but those few weeks in the fall of 2008 when I worked my ass off, walked through hell with a few good friends and colleagues, and made a difference.

I felt a need to make a real difference, not an indirect theoretical greater-good-of-humanity difference but a real, conrete, direct difference in the lives of actual individuals, as I said a few months ago in my response to my SAR team leader's blog post about our reasons for doing SAR work. After Hurricane Ike and a few more missions, my mind was made up; I wanted to do forensics, specifically human remains detection, but I still had hopes of combining it with Nautical Archaeology to work on submerged remains, with the most likely application being POW/MIA recovery (which is also a cause I have long had a soft spot for).

Unfortunately, early in the spring semester of 2009, a very close friend, who I usually describe(d) as my brother, died in a car wreck; the loss and my failure to cope well with it left me too distracted, depressed, and generally useless to finish out the semester, though I muddled through an unsuccessful attempt because I wasn't sure what else to do and wasn't thinking clearly enough to consider it.

I never even formally left. "Oops" might be an understatement.

At present, my intention is to return to school for an eventual doctorate in physical anthropology, but both finances and geography are a challenge; my husband is in the Army, so we don't get much choice about our location, and committing to a traditional academic program at this point would be highly impractical even if we could afford it. My hope is that within the next few years we can some financial issues sorted out and perhaps even get stationed somewhere near a university with a suitable program, and then I can work quickly enough to complete a degree before we get sent elsewhere again. In the meantime, I find that I miss the academic community and involvement in research and the exchange of ideas, even more than I expected that I would. Once I get this graduate school thing sorted out, I hope and intend and plan and want to work in my actual field; I would enjoy working for JPAC, maybe, or an ME's office wherever we end up, but I do not forsee an academic career in my future- I'm not willing enough to sacrifice the rest of my interests and goals for it- but I do forsee and hope for continued involvement in research.

Where and how I see myself in terms of goals, ambitious, and interests has come into focus in a much more useful way in the past few months, so that I have a good idea of what I want to be doing, and who I want to be, in the short term, on the way to my return to school, and how I would like that to fit into the transition back into a degree program and the shape I would like my career to take afterward. I am beginning to finally take to heart the advice my father once gave me when he said that I shouldn't try to make a career out of every passing interest- but I'm mingling that with my own recent discovery that inability to make a career out of an interest doesn't make it any less a valid and important part of my life, my work, and my identity. I'm a happier person, and a more productive one (in whatever sense you want to define "productive", which I'm learning is also a highly variable word) for that combined realization.

It really is about what Joseph Campbell called "the richness of the quest," and productive endeavors are endeavors that contribute to that for me, whether or they're professional, paid, and/or institutionally supported.

SAR will always be one of those productive endeavors for me. I enjoy the occasional adventure, the fieldwork, the camaraderie, and the dogs; I thrive on the sense of purpose. It's what I live for and an essential part of who I am.

Another of those endeavors, which suffered somewhat during my time in graduate school and which I am only recently returning to in any serious way, is writing. I have wanted to be a writer since third grade; I remember almost the exact moment when I discovered writing was fun, and I have been obsessed with telling stories and shaping words ever since. I need the creative outlet, and I find that I am happier and feel better about myself on days when I get a substantial amount of writing done; only recently have I figured out that I have to let myself see this as a valid productive activity so I can give myself the time for it and feel good about getting it done and proud of the results.

Blogging is sort of an extension of that; it's a different kind of outlet, which lets me tell slightly different stories- true ones- in more appropriate ways; it also gives me a place to vent, a place to put ideas that aren't fully developed enough for other venues and may never be, and a way to stay at least somewhat connected with an intellectual and academic community.

I do miss that sort of connection, and I miss involvement in interesting research. My research interests are somewhat scattered, but my primary interest, the one I hope to focus on in my eventual career, is human remains / clandestine grave detection. This is primarily an outgrowth of my volunteer work, as several years of observations and experiences in the field have both given me theoretical curiosity about these things, and emphasized the need for answers to certain questions and improvements in certain methods and procedures. I can easily see a life's work in finding the missing, bringing closure if not comfort to the bereaved, and maybe even bringing the bad guys to justice.

I have a secondary set of research interests, which I mostly intend to be avocational, in mortuary iconography, gravestone and historic cemetery documentation and preservation, and historic grave detection and documentation. At the moment I'm finding an outlet for that through Find-A-Grave and my related blog Last Words; this is also a much easier area to pursue independent research in than forensics,
so I am currently working on a couple of independent projects on changes in iconography patterns across time and region.

None of that alters or replaces the basic fact that I have to earn a living, and that my husband and I both would like to be living a bit more comfortably than we presently are, so as much as I might like to, I can't abandon all monetary concerns and become a self-unemployed bliss-following writer/researcher/emergency responder/philosopher. That does sound like a lovely retirement plan, but in the meantime, I've come to some realizations about work, as well. First, I can be essentially content with my life, if not my work hours, doing even the relatively unfulfilling, degree-irrelevant sorts of work that Liberal Arts and Humanities BA's often get stuck with, so long as I have those other productive, fulfilling aspects of my life to give me a sense of identity, progress, involvement, purpose, and self-worth.

Second, it's easier than I originally thought to find interesting and/or fulfilling work now that pays decently, even if it doesn't directly bear on either my current or future degree; that's where having a diverse set of interests helps. My job at the funeral home, for instance, has its challenges, but it's not the sort of thing anyone needs a degree of any sort for, and it's solidly below the level of responsibility that I'm technically qualified for- but it's interesting work, and it's deeply fulfilling to go home at the end of the day knowing that I have helped someone, even if only in a small way, at a moment when they badly needed it, so I am content; this is a good place to be for now, on my way to another eventual destination.

In A Pirate Looks at Fifty, Jimmy Buffett commented that when he was a child, a frustrated adult demanded to know what he wanted to do with his life; the young Buffett replied that he wanted to live a damned interesting one.

Me too.

Looking for some body...

Mission callouts from my SAR team leader all seem to take the same shape these days; the phone rings, and he asks, as usual, "What are you doing this weekend?"

I reply, as usual, "I don't know, but I have the feeling you're about to tell me." I also have the feeling it's going to involve dogs and probably at least one dead person (missing people who might be alive typically won't wait for a weekend; those happen on their schedule, not ours). As usual, I was right on all counts.

I don't get to see my SAR teammates nearly enough since I moved out here with Greg last year; it was a very sudden transition from seeing them all at least twice a week, often more, to maybe once every couple of months if time and gas money fell into place. These people, and most of the dogs, too, are like an adopted family to me, and I miss them, and part of me feels a little guilty about leaving. If this PCS move to El Paso goes through, it may be several more months before I can work with them at all, so when I got the call from my team leader the other day, there was the usual drive to find the missing, solve the mystery, help the family, but also a much more personal and sentimental reaction to getting to spend a weekend in the field with my team again.

As soon as I hung up the phone, I realized I had just done something slightly stupid; the medication for my Crohn's-related iritis dilates my pupil and makes me painfully and ridiculously photosenstive, to the extent that I can't tolerate sunlight even with two pairs of sunglasses on. The only solution, since I wasn't willing to miss the search, was skipping my medication for a couple of days. That went tremendously better than I honestly expected, though not without some moderate discomfort.

I make the comment on every search, and it always applies: "Why am I never following this guy and his border collie through anything pleasant?" Despite being nominally "in town," our search area this weekend was composed partially undeveloped and partially abandoned areas, full of brush and undergrowth as only Texas can do it; Greg came home with an inexplicable spot of poison ivy on the inside of elbow (seriously, how do you get poison ivy there?) and I managed to garb hold of a thorny vine this morning, so I spent a few minutes cussing and bleeding- but honestly, I live for this shit; the messier and harder the better. I'll take my adventures where I find them.

Heat was a major challenge this weekend; it limits the working time of both dogs and people, but the limits heat places on the dogs are narrower and less negotiable. Even an eager, willing dog cannot do scent work effectively in extreme heat, because the act of panting affects airflow through the nasal passages in ways that bypass most of the important bits for serious scenting, and because the heat changes the extent to which the scent itself emanates from the remains and the way those molecules behave. Our work was limited to half days, which meant early mornings, several hours of searching, and then lazy recuperative afternoons. That turns out to be a really pleasant combination; being clean and cool and lounging around with a good book and a glass of sweet tea is something you never really understand how much you fail to appreciate properly until you're doing it after a morning of sweat and dirt and soreness, and the tiredness itself is that vaguely pleasant kind that comes from having done something fulfilling.

The case itself was too interesting to pass up, and as we worked this weekend, we increasingly found that much about the situation and the information we had were difficult to make sense of (hence my comment on Twitter, during a break at base, that every case is different but some are more different than others). We spent some time at dinner last night comparing notes, exchanging ideas, and debating theories and fragments of theories; our informal version of debriefs, those discussions, especially when we're all loopy and giddy from exhaustion and heat, are always one of my favorite parts of the mission.

I'm really glad, as always, that my husband Greg is willing to do this work with me. Search and Rescue / Recovery is demanding work mentally, physically, and emotionally, and requires a commitment of time and resources that few people are willing or able to make; without understanding and supportive family members, it would be impossible to do what we do. I had hoped for and expected that support, but I'm continually amazed by and grateful for Greg's willingness to be actively involved with the team himself.

His training and competence are tremendous assets in the field. Just today, he ended up running communications at base (at least partially because he was mildly frustrated with civilian radio practices; this was when I learned that the word "repeat" in military radio protocol means "shoot it again" which is not something that comes up a lot in civilian applications). My teammates are like my family, and I don't lightly trust anyone to watch out for them, but I know I can count on Greg.


Besides, my teammates are like my family mostly because of the nature of this work. The hours together, the shared challenges and experiences, the moments of silliness and stress and triumph, and the emotional nature of what we do all form a bond that you sort of have to experience to understand. I'm glad that Greg and I get to share that too.

(cross-posted on my personal blog, One Day at a Time)

Always check the shoes.

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

My friend Sarah posted a link to this MSNBC slideshow this morning. When I looked at it then, one of the first few pictures was an image of a little girl's white shoe sitting forlornly on the pavement, with piles of rubble and debris in the background (I've been through all four slideshows now, hoping to find the picture again to post it here, but it must have been moved).

Seeing that shoe brought back a lot of memories of the search for human remains on the Texas coast after Hurricane Ike back in 2008.

The debris piles contained a lot of small personal items; when you hear about "debris piles," you think of pieces of buildings, downed trees, but it's too easy to forget about all the small everyday things that make up our lives: books, toys, knickknacks, clothing. The psychological impact of seeing such mundane, fundamentally human items tossed about and abandoned that way was worse than seeing homes reduced to debris and even worse than the knowledge that the residents might still be under there somewhere. It was jarring, poignant, and sad.

I remember finding several picture frames and photo albums; always, we went through those albums page by page, hoping to find at least one picture to perhaps return to a family for some small measure of comfort, but every time the pictures had been either torn out by the water or disintegrated. Walking through the remains of homes on Bolivar, I had to fight the urge to pick up all the sad-looking children's toys among the debris and leave them somewhere sheltered but visible where a returning child might find them. We marvelled, though, at the sight of glass Christmas ornaments somehow intact, nestled among boards and nails and shingles, and my team leader told the story of the crystal clock he found, intact and upright, in a table in a flooded-out home in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Most of our work took place in a county on the mainland, across Galveston Bay from the low-lying barriers of Galveston Island and Bolivar Peninsula which caught the brunt of Ike's landfall. Across the thirty-mile length of the bay and seven miles inland, we found pieces of homes from Bolivar and Galveston carried there by the storm surge. The majority of what made it across the bay and the prairie were lighter, more buoyant items- wooden housing components including a whole porch and section of wall, refrigerators and water heaters, lightbulbs and Christmas ornaments almost miraculously intact, whole flocks of carved wooden pelicans that the local sheriffs collected and tossed into the backs of ATVs swearing they were worth something, boats, foam kickboards and surfboards and life vests, buoys...

...and shoes.

Early on, while we were still working on Bolivar (I have looked and looked for Diamond Street every time I have been back there, and I don't know if it lost its street sign or was destroyed, but I've never found it again), my team leader told me to check the shoes to be certain they were empty. The human ankle joint, much like its counterpart in the wrist, does not articulate as securely as certain others, so hands and feet disarticulate and detach with relative ease. The added buoyancy of a shoe could easily have allowed a foot to be carried across the expanse of water by the storm surge. Police in Canada have seen ample evidence of this.

It became part of my job in the field, in addition to pulling smelly dogs out of even smellier water, carrying extra supplies, and watching for alligators, to flip over any shoes we found in the debris piles and check for feet. There is no tension quite like seeing a pair of children's shoes laying together, upside down, in a pile of debris, and no relief quite like turning them over to find them empty, with a plastic zip-tie with the store's tag attached still holding them together.

Part of a shoe store must have gotten washed up in that area, because all along that section of the debris pile, we found several more pairs of shoes still bound together, mostly upside-down, and it kept us on edge for a while even after we figured out what must have happened.

We never found a shoe that was not empty, nor in fact any actual human remains on that side of the bay, but the memory stays with me, so strongly that to this day, even in my own apartment, if I see a shoe lying upside down, I reflexively kick it over and look inside.

Why am I never following that guy and his dog through anything nice?

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

I emerged from my nice warm bed this morning to discover that the Decepticon Maxima's windshield was frozen over with such a thick layer of ice that attempts at scraping it off didn't do more than scuff up the glossy surface of the ice a bit. I tried to get into the car to turn the defroster on, only to discover that the door handle was coated with as much ice as the rest of the car and the door itself was frozen shut. Shivering, I shuffled around to the passenger side of the car, which thanks to being to leeward, hadn't gotten quite as thickly coated. I managed to tug the passenger door open and scoot over into the driver's seat. I was still half an hour late to work, because it took me that long to manage to scrape off a 6inx6in porthole in the ice so I could see enough to drive, very slowly, and then I had to stop halfway there, because the frozen precipitation kept hitting the windshield and freezing there, blocking what little view I had.

Not one of my brighter decisions, honestly, but it's all backroads on the way to work, and I think most of the rest of this town was sensible enough to stay home, especially since they declared a late-reporting day on the base and that place accounts for most of the traffic here. I got to work, and an hour later my boss decided to send us all home for the day because the weather was steadily worsening. Back into the car, more windshield-scraping, and another slow nerve-wracking drive home, and now I'm warm and comfy, looking forward to a whole day off.

I desperately need one, too. It's been a long few days.

Sunday was entirely my fault.

After clearing that chilly but uneventful dive mission on Saturday morning, I was looking forward to the rest of my weekend. I managed to go home and change and spent a pleasant afternoon with my grandma's neighbor (who is also married to a soldier; her husband is due home this week, yay for them!) learning a new recipe and chatting over a glass of wine while we baked.

I had just gotten home, intending to curl up with a good book for a little while and maybe throw together a followup post about that dive mission (this one was written on-scene on my phone), when my phone rang; when I answered, my SAR team leader greeted me with, "Hey, we're in (insert neighboring county here). What are you doing tomorrow?"

"Well, Fearless Leader," I replied, "I guess I'm driving to (insert neighboring county here). What've we got?"

The answer turned out to be a missing toddler; operations had switched to recovery mode and active searching was set to resume at 0700. It was a long drive, so in the interest of not having to leave my apartment at 0400 to get there, I decided to drive up that night and bunk with everyone else in the elementary school gym, where the Red Cross had set up a very comfortable (by search standards) set of living quarters for the searchers.

I got there about 2300, in time to catch a quick briefing from my team leader and the leader of another local team (well, local back before I moved two hours away to be with Greg and work at the funeral home) who was running the canine part of the incident. We had cots in the gym, so I was spared the hassle of getting Greg's spare Army cot out of the trunk and figuring how to set it up in the dark without waking those who had already gone to sleep- I just tossed my sleeping bag and pillow onto an empty cot and settled in.

See, one of the few perks about my husband being in the Army is that he occasionally brings me home spare gear, since he knows I can use it for SAR and he's awesome and supportive like that.

So I have one of those wonderful Army sleeping bags that, if you zip the two layers together, is apparently perfectly comfortable down to about -40f. Well, Greg says that unless it actually is that cold, you really don't want both layers; one can stand alone for slightly warmer temperatures and one is just a liner. Apparently in my rush out the door, I grabbed the liner instead of the sleeping bag proper, because when Fearless Leader tapped me on the shoulder to wake me up in the morning, I was curled up at the bottom of the sleeping bag with my head somewhere near my knees and my pillow pulled into the sleeping bag after me to close off the opening. It was cold.

I also jumped about three feet and tried to come up swinging but my arms were still in the sleeping bag. And I screamed. I am too used to sleeping alone.

We spent the day slogging through a lot of areas that I think are eventually intended to become residential developments but which are presently occupied by lots of really nasty dense brush. Some of it came up to my shoulders, not that that takes much, and I actually carried my hiking stick, which I usually don't do because I like having my hands free, just for the sake of having something to knock the stuff aside with. That didn't do much good with those damn mesquite thorns, though, and my hands are still all scratched up. I need to learn to wield a machete properly.

Oh, and there were open manholes scattered around, which thanks to the brush, you couldn't see until they were right under you.

Why am I never following that old man and his border collie through anything pleasant?

I say that on every search.

It could have been worse, though. Nothing we have ever waded through, except maybe those six-foot drifts of reeds and dead cows, has ever been nearly as rough as Goat Island after Hurricane Ike.

Anyway, it was a good mission.

The case itself was really sad, of course; recoveries are always a little sad, and situations involving kids are hard for everyone, but you learn to look at these things a little more philosophically after a while, and it becomes bearable.

Dad, who is himself a former EMT, once commented that it must be difficult finding all these people dead and not being able to save any of them. I told him that it's actually a little easier to take, emotionally. That probably sounds weird if you've never done this, but there's something less wrenching about going out to look for someone you already know is dead, than trying to save someone and failing. Even in EMS, sometimes someone's fate is actually up to your decisions, your actions, and your skills, but often it's not. Often that person is going to die no matter what you or seven better medics or Dr. Red Duke the God of Trauma himself try to do about it- and you learn to accept that to an extent, but not completely, or at least I never did. There's still a sense of guilt, of failure, of wondering what you could have done differently or if someone else could have made the difference.

With recovery missions, I know that the person's fate was totally out of my hands; it's sad, but the sense of guilt and loss and failure isn't there.

Not finding the body, like this weekend, is another matter. My first mission ever, we went home without making a recovery, and it was really hard for me to take. It later turned out that the information available had led the search effort to be directed at the wrong area. I've finally come to accept that no matter how much we want to give the family closure and/or help justice to be done and/or give the deceased the basic human dignity of a proper disposition, you simply can't find what isn't there. It's just something you have to accept.

It really was a good search though- multiple canine teams worked together smoothly and cordially the whole way through, and on Sunday we were even fielding in integrated units, with members of two or three different teams in the field together. I've never seen that happen on a search before, and it was really great to see that everyone was willing to work together that way and put the mission first; it's something I hope to see more of. We worked with some really great people out there, and I'm hoping we can repeat that too. As much as the case itself was the sort of thing that could totally destroy all faith in humanity, the nature of the response could do a lot to restore it.

Anyway, I say that was my fault, because I left the dive mission on Saturday feeling guilty for standing around the command trailer all day, taking a couple of notes for the dive log, and then eating the nice hot lunch the Salvation Army lady brought us. I felt like a superfluous waste of resources- so of course the universe had to toss us another mission so I could make up for it.

It was late on Sunday night when I got home, and Monday I walked right into a busy day at work, most of which I got through accompanied by a persistent icepicks-in-the-eyeballs headache. At twenty minutes until 1700 that afternoon, I was almost desperately looking forward to going home and taking a nap- and then the phone rang.

See a pattern here?

A friend's baby was very sick and she needed to go the ER, so off we went and didn't get home until a little past time to collapse into bed, headache and all.

Yesterday was a nice recuperative day; most of the day at work was spent reading, and most of the evening was spent napping and taking a bubble bath and finally getting to enjoy the avocado I bought for myself Saturday afternoon.

And now I have a day off!

I think I shall write the second chapter of this story. It seems fitting, because the events that take place in the second chapter are centered on the day being the anniversary of something, and today is, strangely enough, the anniversary of the real-life basis for that.

Perhaps that someone's way of telling me that now is the time.

Field notes

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

It's a cold morning, though one of the warmest we've had all week- forty degrees according to the form I filled out when we arrived on scene, but with a stiff cold wind out of the west-southwest. There is still snow on the ground in the shady places and the edges of the little cove near the boat ramp where we've set up IC.

The actual dive site is around the peninsula to our north, and the support crew are all huddled here, keeping scene logs by radio and waiting to help warm and hydrate the divers as they return by boat.

The generator for the command trailer spent the hour of the morning sputtering and dying every few minutes, and it's cut off entirely now. We were using the gas stove in the trailerfor heat, carbon monoxide be damned, but we gave up on that, and now we're standing around a police car, using it for a base radio and the trailer as a windbreak.

Just waiting. It's unusual not being at the dive site to tend and count bubbles and document things in person, but every operation is different and we adapt well.

Us civilians are listening to the two cops on the support crew swapping stories, waiting for word from the dive crew. Documentation is my job today.

Obviously we're doing a lot of waiting, since I have time to write this. When we get busy it's urgent, but there's a lot of downtime, especially on this end.

Brrr. I'm glad I wore my husband's wool socks today.

Do your femurs make you look lazy?

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

I've been reading interesting things about femurs lately!

For instance, if you take a cross-section of a femur at around the middle of the shaft, the shape of that cross-section can indicate the individual's activity level.

Bones, like muscles, grow and develop in response to physical exercise over time. Ambulatory activities like walking and running excercise the leg muscles and expose the bone to mechanical stresses in the anterior-posterior (front to back) direction. The result is that a person who does a lot of long-distance walking or running during his or her lifetime will have a femoral cross-section that looks vaguely elliptical, with the bone being thicker on the anterior-posterior (front ot back) axis than in the medial-lateral (side to side) direction. In other words, if you walk or run a lot, your femur will be thicker than it is wide.

More sedentary types, like most modern Americans, will have femoral cross-sections that are pretty much symmetrical in all directions, since the bone hasn't been exposed to much greater stress on any particular axis.

My fiance, when I told him this, was instantly self-conscious about the possibility of having round midshaft femoral cross-sections. He makes me laugh. :)

Anyway, that spiffy bit of triva came from Skeletons in Our Closet: Revealing Our Past Through Bioarchaeology by Clark Spencer Larsen.

It was one of that set I rescued from the flea market a couple of months ago, and it may well be the best fifteen cents or so that I ever spent. Larsen's writing style is engaging and easy to follow, and he works his wonderfully clear explanations of osteopathology and analysis methods into the unfolding story of his own research in the Great Basin, which is in turn set against the larger story of the global transition from hunting-and-gathering to farming and its consequences for human health and lifestyles.

I'm actually taking notes as I read this one, because it's interesting information and very well presented, and because I'm making a concerted effort to maintain both decent study habits and passable currency in the field between now and the time I start back to grad school (hopefully January of 2012). So far it feels like it's working.