Sunday, December 6, 2009 - Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad NM
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Dawn, Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad NM, December 5, 2009
Yesterday dawned bright and sunny - then clouded over and stayed cold. Today dawned bright and sunny and the sun stayed around most all day, and took the rest of the remaining snow over the hill with the sunset. We like it. These big, colorful New Mexico sunrises and sets never fail to lift the soul.
It's nice to finally have a day with no nagging repair issues to worry about and I've given myself a day off to fool with the website and walk in the sun.
Collectanea
I've been wanting for a long time to make better use of my collection of passages I've clipped over the years and this afternoon I spent some time working on a scheme for reorganizing them. Once I get the formatting worked out on a few test pages I'll have to go in do some minor editing on each of the hundreds of pages. This will be a tedious task and I want to be sure to get it right the first time. It would be no fun doing it twice! I stuck a box with a random passage from the collection at the foot of these pages as a test to see if it works out.
Night camp
Site 37 - Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad NM
- Verizon cell phone service - Access is via Extended Network, roaming
- No Verizon EVDO service - access is via the Extended Network and service varies with many drop-outs.
- See a list of the nights I've camped at Brantley Lake State Park
- Locate Brantley Lake State Park on my Night Camps map
- Go to Brantley Lake State Park website
- Locate services on my Resources map
- Check the weather here
Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.