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.

Stories in Stone (book review!)

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

I just finished reading Stories in Stone: A Field Guide to Cemetery Symbolism and Iconography. It occupied me during the slow stretch at work last week, because even on my rather morbid bookshelves I couldn't find anything more perfect to read at a funeral home. Several other items came close, though, and I think I'm going to make a point of choosing my at-work reading accordingly, just to see how long it takes someone to notice.

Besides, I have a certain morbid "I Like Sunlight Too Much And Don't Mope Enough To Be A Goth, But I Still Wear Too Much Black And Don't Mind The Smell of Decomp" reputation to maintain.

It was written (and photographed, kudos for versatility) by Douglas Keister, a man with a rather unfortunate surname (the poor fellow must have been the butt of lots of jokes).

Yes, that was immature of me. I'm done giggling now.

Um, actually, not yet.

Okay, now.

Moving on.

This one was an acquisition from Barnes and Noble's bargain shelves (as was Kwaidan and a decent handful of my other books; apparently either that's where they keep all the really obscure weird stuff, or I'm just broke a lot but still addicted to books... probably both. I bought it on an outing with Greg before I actually moved up here with him, so there were some pleasant memories found in just picking it up again. It amuses me sometimes how many of my books I can actually remember the provenance of, and I will be both happy and sad the day my library is large enough that this changes.

Overall, the book was a nice enough read, although I'm fairly sure it was intended more for use as a guidebook than for sit-down reading, as the title suggests. It's divided into chapters, and each chapter has an introduction and then several encyclopedia-style topical entries, each ranging in length from a few lines to a couple of pages. That makes it handy for looking things up but a little choppy to just read straight through.

I was reading at work and in a somewhat scattered mood over the last few days, so having something in short quickly digestible blocks was actually a plus, under the circumstances.

There were a few slightly erroneous statements that caught my attention, though:

Page 72: "Anubis, Egyptian god of the dead, is depicted with the head of a dog."

Calling Anubis the god of the dead is oversimplifying the Egyptian pantheon a bit; Osiris is technically the ruler of the underworld and the deceased counterpart to the living king Horus. A dead pharaoh was an embodiment of and one with Osiris the way a living pharaoh was an embodiment of and one with Horus. Pretty much all the gods have some role in the preparation, final journey, judgment, or afterlife of the deceased- most of the Egyptian gods are in some way "gods of the dead." Anubis himself was more a god of the funerary process, particularly embalming. Still, that's forgivable except...

Anubis' head was that of a jackal, not a dog. A dog is less like a jackal than you are like a gorilla.

It's a minor enough mistake, except that I would except any book on funerary imagery to at least get the basic features of Anubis' identity right. Maybe I'm just an Egyptology snob.

Page 138: "Word entomologists tell us that the phrase 'gone to pot' may have had its origin as a reference to a cinerary urn."

I'm not sure what a word entomologist is- perhaps someone who studies whether silverfish in libraries prefer to eat pages with more nouns or verbs? I'm equally unsure whether that is a typographical error or, more likely, someone getting the words themselves swapped around, which I've seen happen numerous times. All obscure disciplines beginning with the letter E must be, on some level, interchangeable.

Either way, it's something a copy editor at least should have caught.

On the other hand, "cinerary" is a damn cool word.

These are relatively minor errors, but I found them a little jarring, and they gave me cause to take the rest of the information in the book with a grain of salt, because those were just the errors I recognized. What else could the author have gotten wrong in areas outside my scope of knowledge that I might not catch? Mistakes like that cost some credibility with the reader.

The author regained a portion of that credibility by including a decent bibliography at the end. I'm a sucker for a good bibliography, especially if the book managed to leave me more interested in the topic on the last page than I was on the first- which this one did.

I also appreciated the discussion of Chinese and Japanese iconography, symbolism, and practices. Too many Western studies tend to overlook non-European perspectives, and it was refreshing to find a more comprehensive approach, in addition to the fact that the information itself was an interesting overview.

The photography was beautiful and well-integrated with the text, and the captions were informative and concise.

Having finished Stories in Stone, I'm contemplating following up with a Saturday outing to one of the historic cemeteries in the Bell County area with the digital camera and this handy guidebook. Maybe I'll find something interesting.

Sad news

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

I was just informed by my team leader yesterday afternoon that one of my teammates' dogs has been diagnosed with cancer and has only three to six months left to live.

We are a small, close-knit team, and have been told repeatedly that to outside viewers we look more like a family than a search and rescue team (albeit a really morbid and insanely focused family with some strange hobbies), and after three years and over a dozen missions (and I'm the newcomer!) it feels that way. None of us can feel the loss quite as deeply as the handler who now faces losing her partner, but we all feel it, in ways that would probably surprise outsiders.

There is no connection quite like that between a working canine handler and her dog. They share hours in training filled with the shared challenge of teaching and learning- both their respective tasks and the much more complex process of teaching each other to communicate and understand- as well as the laughter and play of fun and reward and the thrill and pride of success. Then they share grueling hours in the field, in heat and cold, in wind and sun and rain, through mud and brush and water, over rocks and rubble, hungry and thirsty and tired but united by shared trials and shared dedication. At last they share the profound fulfillment of a find. It is the dog with whom the handler first shares the rewarding knowledge of having brought closure to a family and dignity to a lost human being. If there is no find, it is with the dog that the handler first shares the frustration and disappointment of failure. It is the dog with whom the handler also first shares her reaction to the emotional nature of the work- the fact that even the joy of a find is a grim thing, and that the things we find are almost never pleasant. And in the end, it is the dog for whom the handler reserves her pride. If the handler has succeeded in anything, it is in teaching, for it is the dog upon whom all else relies.

The other members of a team form their own attachments. Every handler and flanker assists in some way with the training of every dog on the team; all of us share at least some of those hours in the field, some of those victories and defeats and the challenges and joys along the way. That sharing binds all of us, human and canine alike, into something very like a family. The word "team" for me will always carry that connotation, and "teammate" will never mean merely "colleague" or "friend"; it means something more like "brother" or "sister". Now we all grieve the loss of one of our teammates, and we also grieve for the suffering of another teammate as she faces the loss of her partner.

Aspen and her handler have been my friends and my teammates for three years now. I've followed that dog over rubble piles after Hurricane Ike and feared for her safety at every step. I've fallen asleep in the car on the way home from missions using her as a pillow, and I've watched her sleep with her head on my knee on those same trips, drooling down my leg. I've sat behind her on a boat, trying to gauge whether she might be about to alert by counting the wrinkles in her forehead (that worried, hyperfocused expression Rottweilers do so well) and suffered no end of teasing because the resultant picture looks like I'm sniffing her butt. That dog has stepped on my head more times than I can count during training, when I was lying underwater playing simulated drowning victim and she chose to mark my position by walking over me. She has also very patiently been there when I needed a hug- there is nothing in the world quite so solid and reassuring to hug as an amiable Rottweiler.

I remember one search last spring, when we had been out all day in the heat and a group of us accompanied Aspen down to the water for a cool-down. Her handler was tossing a tennis ball into the water for her to retrieve, enjoying a nice cooling swim in the process. The victim's family was on-scene not far away, and a little boy- a younger cousin or nephew of the victim, I think- walked up and asked if he could throw the ball for the big dog. The kid's father was hesitant, not wanting to bother the busy rescue team, but Aspen's handler assented- Aspen is a certified therapy dog in addition to SAR, and the kid was, for a few minutes, not an anxious family member, not languishing in the heat, not wondering why the adults were all so sad- he was just a happpy little kid playing in the water with a big happy dog, and I've always thought Aspen probably changed his entire perception of the day.

Aspen has been a good dog, a good friend, and a good teammate, and we will all miss her.

Musings on Myth

Reposted from my personal blog,One Day at a Time.

So, it's a slow day at the funeral home, and I'm settled in here at my desk with Joseph Campbells's Transformations of Myth Through Time which is actually much less dry than the title makes it sound.

Campbell is an anthropolgist focused on myth and comparative religion, brilliant and insightful and engagingly articulate. The book itself is a collection of fairly informal lectures, so the writing style is a little more casual than I was expecting, as you'll see in the bits I quote below, but it's every bit as fascinating and challenging as I had come to expect from Joseph Campbell.

As I read Chapter 2, certain pieces really got me thinking, and I decided to share some commentary. A lot of it is likely to stir up some controversy and get me called some unpleasant names, and I apologize in advance to whoever I might offend. /disclaimer

[. . .] "And when it came to this problem of explaining what this Buddha-consciousness or Christ-consciousness was, I looked up at the ceiling for an inspiration and I found one. I said, 'Look up, boys, at the ceiling and you will see that the lights(plural) are on, or you might also say the light (singular) is on, and this is two ways of saying the same thing.' In one case, you are placing emphasis on the individual bulb, in the other you are placing emphasis on the light.

[. . .] Now when one of those light bulbs breaks, the superintendent doesn't come in and say, 'Well, that was my particularly favorite bulb.' He takes it out, throws it away, and puts another one in. What is important is not the vehicle, but the light.

Now, looking down at all your heads, I ask myself, of what are these the vehicles? They are the vehicles of consciousness. How much consciousness are they radiating, and which are you? Are you the vehicle, or are you the consciousness?" -p. 29

The underlying assumption here is that each lightbulb emits a light quantitatively- and more important, qualitatively- equal to the bulb it replaced and the bulb which will replace it, not to mention the bulbs surrounding it in the meantime. The individual bulbs are identical and interchangeable, and so is the light they emit; so is its effect on the total Light in the room. An individual bulb's light contributes nothing to the Light but quantity; it has no special characteristics that make an impact on the whole shared Light.

By extension, the analogy asserts that human beings are vessels and vehicles for consciousness in the same way that light bulbs are vessels and vehicles for light; it also asserts that the consciousness contained in and expressed by each individual human (components of a univeral Consciousness which our myths strive to make us aware of and in connect us to) is not only quantitatively equal to that of every other individual, but quantitatively equal and interchangable as well. There is nothing unique about any one individual, no special contribution or effect on the Consciousness or the Universe which can be made by that individual and that individual alone. The next bulb in the row produces an identical light.

A certain interpretation of the Buddhist philosophy expressed in the analogy could assert that the personality and uniqueness that define each of our worldly selves as individuals are actually part of the earthly vessel rather than part of the transcendent consciousness to which Campbell refers. My Western individualism rebels against this notion.

White light, from a physics standpoint, is made up of all the colors in the light spectrum; to produce white, these colors must be mixed in equal amounts- an imbalance produces a bluish or reddish or greenish light. Suppose for a moment that, if we continue Campbell's analogy and represent human consciousness as light, each individual's unique qualities- the things that make my soul a similar thing to your soul, but definitely not the same soul- are represented as variations in the color of that individual's light, and the combination of various-hued lights from the bank of bulbs merges eventually into a white spotlight.

Just a thought.

"Now I want to go back to the main myth of the Navajo. [. . .] It is of the first people having come up from the womb of the earth through a series of four stages, and they go from one stage to another. Some accident happens in the lower stages; a flood comes as a punishment for impropriety of some sort, the breaking of a taboo or something of the sort, and they come on up. And finally they come to the top level, the earth on which we are now." - p. 32

This account could be viewed as approximately parallel to the Biblical account of Man's "fall" and subsequent divine punishments. Adam and Eve's banishment from the Garden of Eden could, in the Navajo context, represent a forced climb up from one stage to the next. The aftermath of the flood in Noah's day could represent another (Campbell doesn't mention whether the Navajo account includes an attrition rate).

Does anyone with more Biblical knowledge than I possess want to see if we can figure out which events there might parallel the Navajo's four stages? It could be an interesting project.

"Furthermore, the land is the holy land. And the land where you are, not the land someplace else. Not only the body, but the specific landscape in which the people are dwelling is sanctified in these old mythologies. You don't have to go someplace else to find the holy land." -p. 29

"But there is a difference between the science of 2000 B.C. and the science of A.D. 2000. And we're in trouble on it because we have a sacred text that was composed somewhere else by another people a long time ago and has nothing to do with the experience of our lives. And so there's a fundamental disengagement.

[. . .]An article from Foreign Affairs called the "Care and Repair of Public Myths" says that a society that does not have a myth to support and give it coherence goes into dissolution. That's what's happening to us." -p.46-47

While I personally do not subscribe to the claim that the United States of America was founded as a Christian nation, any halfway astute observer has to admit that our social structure and the public concerns which become political issues have been influenced heavily by Judeo-Christian philosophy, beliefs, and writings, and that our public is predominantly at least nominally Christian.

That means that a significant portion of America's culture and public life are based heavily on writings and thoughts and laws written thousands of years ago in another place and another culture. We have no native, American myth tied to this place and this culture and this societal reality- all the belief systems tied to American soil and American settings were systematically wiped out with only a few scattered, aging, and mostly disregarded survivals. We are, as a culture and as a nation and as a people, mythically and philosophically displaced. We have no roots of myth or belief to call our own- we're still clinging to someone else's and trying to make them fit.

Campbell's commentary about the land flows from a discussion of how most Native American belief systems, and others around the world, both drew their myth from the landscape around them and, if they relocated, resituated their myth onto the new landscape. They made their home itself the Holy Land. Most modern Americans (and many modern Europeans) don't consider their home the Holy Land. Their myth- our myth, is not tied to our home. It's tied to another place and another culture thousands of miles away on another continent. This has produced not only a sense of cultural displacement, but some very expensive political entanglements out of the resulting sense of obligation to some foreign place most of us will never see, let alone live in and truly identify with.

It occurs to me that this "disconnect" Campbell mentions between our culture and that from which we try to draw guidance may be the source of so much of the cultural polarization and strife today. We have no roots, we have no direction, and of course we're at each other's throats, because trying to hash out a common identity and a common philosophy without that is a nasty process.

The solution? I don't honestly know. I'm not foolish enough or arrogant enough to declare anyone's religion outdated or wrong, and that's not at all what I'm trying to say here. Certainly we can't do a quick edit of the Bible and change some place names and update some cultural references. One, it's terribly disrespectful at the least, and two, someone's going to notice, you know? So what do we do?