Summer of 1993 - More Plants

 Today, I have a selection of more plants from the summer of 1993. Again, this is driven only by what I have pictures of. There are some pictures that I can only guess what the plant was. Forget using those! Remember, this was back when you had to have film and wait days to see if you got anything good. And I only had a moderately good camera at that time. It was better than an Instamatic, but I wasn't as careful as I might have been. Or perhaps I was trying to take pictures with one hand while holding Chips with the other. Who knows!?

Everyone loves water lilies. This is the common water lily, Nymphaea alba. It's native, as are all of the plants I'll show you today. It likes water at depths of 1-3 feet, so it was very happy in our constructed ponds.

Golden ragwort, now Pakera aurea (it used to be Senecio), is a lovely open woodland and meadow flower. One thing that is a lot of fun about this one is that the buds are purple, so it's a big "surprise" when the flowers turn out to be yellow. That also grows here.

Many of you will likely recognize this plant. It's common in rich woodland of Michigan. This is great Solomon's Seal, Polygonatum biflorum. You can see how the flowers hang in clusters of two, biflorum, under the leaves.

Don't forget Chips... he liked plants too, just usually when they provided nice shade.

This one is Golden Alexanders, Zizia aurea. It has a lot of lookalikes, so you have to pay attention to the leaves. The most common mis-identification is with Wild Parsnip. I have to keep looking them up to remember the difference myself. But the Alexanders have compound leaves with 5-7 oval leaflets. Like the other plants featured today, except for the water lilies, it will tolerate everything from wet meadows to woodlands.

My final plant for the day is one I've only ever seen that one summer. It doesn't grow in Michigan except for a couple of odd finds in the SW part of the state. Again, it will tolerate wet or normal soil, but it does like limestone, and is a transition plant from prairie to forest, like the savannahs that were being reestablished.

And, I didn't take its picture. I drew it. The reason I'm not a very good artist is that I don't have the patience. I only drew the flowers, not the leaves. But I know what it is anyway. There are only a couple of choices, and the truly rare one is far west of where I was. This is Shooting Star, Primula meadia (used to be Dodecatheon). I'd love to find more some day. It can grow to about 20 inches tall. I think this one was maybe 12-14 inches.

Tomorrow, I have some more flowers. I learned quite a few that summer that I don't have pictures of, but I have a couple of prairie plants.

In other news: I'm trying really hard to get the North Country Trail book ready to go to my advance fact-checking readers. I worked my brain to a mushy pulp today. I think it will be ready to send tomorrow.

See Alien Plants

Summer of 1993 - Inside Duties

 Here's where a spent a huge amount of time on the days I was not collecting samples or cleaning culverts. This is the lab trailer.

I tried to look up all the tests I did on every single sample bottle. I'm not sure I have them all, but based on some old spreadsheets, I think it was pH, conductivity, BOD (biological oxygen demand), total Phosphorus, Chlorides, and ammonia. I don't remember much about a lot of it... you just follow the "recipe" in the Standard Operating Procedures manual. Phosphorus and Chlorides required chemical reactions. The picture I recently posted on Facebook, and put last in this post, of me doing chemical analysis was a Phosphorus test... there was one step in there where you had to let the sample turn pink with the addition of drops of reagent. That picture, of course, was in a much nicer lab.

This is one of the stations that I only had to do an instrument reading. And I tried to count the bottles. It does look like 27 or 28. Of course, there was a big backlog of samples to be tested when I got there. Someone else had done collecting and filled the refrigerator with bottles, but they were waiting for the grunt grad assistant to show up to do the tests.

And putting that instrument to use.

Looks about the same, but maybe this one is conductivity. I have a vague memory of what that instrument looked like

Well, doing this over and over got pretty boring, but it was part of the job, and I got a lot of satisfaction out of doing a good job and preparing the graphs showing that the water quality improved as the water flowed through the ponds.

The very worst part of the job was that after testing was complete, all the sample bottles had to be acid washed to remove all traces of the previous water. This means they got washed with soapy water and a brush, rinsed, then a squirt of concentrated sulfuric acid went in each bottle, swished around and rinsed again. Then they were air dried. The acid was in a squirt bottle, but I kept dedicated clothes for all the acid washing, because you were sure to get holes in your clothing.

Where was Chips when I was doing all this? Well, you know, he was a great lab assistant.

That fall, when I went back to U of M, I began as the project coordinator for the constructed wetlands at Matthaei Botanical Gardens in Ann Arbor. I did a post about that. After that was built and functioning, it involved doing all those same tests, collecting monthly samples for five years and doing all that lab work. That's where this picture was taken.

Somewhere here, I want to say that this was all under the instruction of Dr. Robert Kadlec. He was one of the pioneer researchers in demonstrating the capabilities of wetlands to remediate contaminated water. He literally wrote the book on the topic. I was thrilled to be working with him, and that all went well, but my difficulties at U of M came about because I was getting my degree in a different department from his. It's a long, stupid story. Some my fault, some not my fault, but the end result was that "my" department didn't want me. It happens. Grad school can be brutal.

Tomorrow, I get to play outside all day so I'll blog about that. But we'll come back to 1993 for at least one more day after that.

In other news: I finished the big editing job and am making good progress on the trail book.

See Other Outside Duties

Summer of 1993 - Other Outside Duties

 One reason that I got to know Ike so well was that I was his backup person. He had to teach me how to do all the regular things he did so I could do readings in his absence, and we spent a lot of time together. I certainly wouldn't have been able to fix any of the electronics, but sometimes I did the basics.

This is Ike taking a reading from one of the rain guages. I think we had two of them at opposite ends of the property. These had a revolving drum and a roll of paper that took readings all the time and recorded it as a graph. I think the paper had to be changed once a month. Don't take me to task if you know a lot about these and I haven't remembered perfectly. It was a long time ago, and I didn't really do much with it. I think maybe I changed the roll one time.

I showed you on an earlier day that Ike took the readings from the weather station. But I knew how to do this too. It really was just a matter of plugging that handheld unit in to the feed from the station on top of the tower and making sure the numbers came through right and not just gobbledegook.

Doing all these things took time. It's a 500 acre site, and mostly I walked to the locations. They are still in operation. Their website says they have 4 ponds, so either they removed two or my memory is bad. Could be either. This was 31 years ago, and I didn't keep a journal.

Ike's top priority was to check on the main pump that drew water from the river. But he had to teach me what to do if it quit, which occasionally happened. I think something had to be reset every few days. Looks pretty compicated, right?

Well, it was pretty complicated, and I knew nothing except how to punch in the reset codes. However, it did go down late one evening when I was there alone, so they were extra glad someone was on site that day! If that hadn't worked, I would have needed to call Ike.

Ike's other primary duty, and he HATED it because it kept happening over and over, was to deal with this. Where the water went back into the river, in other words, at the far end of the property, was a small double culvert where the water flowed out. Well, you can sort of see where two holes are supposed to be at the bottom of that pile of cattails.

Yes, there were beaver, and it was their great burning desire in life to keep the water in the pond. Every couple of days, Ike had to go back there and clear the culverts. I often helped him.

It was amazing how quickly the beavers (whom I NEVER saw) would plug things back up. Sometimes they got really serious and used more mud than vegetation. This isn't the exit culvert. I'm no longer sure where this went, but they did a fine job. Ike was not pleased.

And how about that Chips? He was having a grand time learning about the world. Like how wind makes waves on the water and they require barking. He was still pretty little in this picture. He hadn't yet turned into the dog that could not be kept out of the water. That didn't really happen until he was maybe 6 months old. Before that, he wasn't afraid of it (Maggie hated the water), but at this he stage he would not yet jump into anything wet.

There was no particular amount of time I was required to spend working. I just had to complete all the tasks, which wasn't much of a problem as long as I wasn't a slacker. The inside jobs took a huge amount of time. We'll visit them tomorrow. But I'll say again that this "job" was heaven on earth for an outdoor-loving human and a puppy.

In other news: I'm almost done with the big editing job I've had for a while, and I'm working on formatting my own book, and played with the cover a bit. I've spent all day working with fonts and graphics and my head is spinning. Still no car.

See Regular Outside Duties

Summer of 1993 - Regular Outside Duties

 Most of my duties as a research assistant had to do with monitoring how well the wetland treatment system was working. Three times a week I took samples from a number of different locations, and checked the temperature of each pond. Here, I'm pulling up the thermometer to get the reading of that pond at the outlet weir.

I'm not sure I can remember all the places I had to take a sample from each pond, but for sure the inlet water (where it came up the pipe from the previous pond in the series).

Also, water had to be collected from each outlet before it ran out the weir.

And the fun one was getting a sample from the approximate center of each pond. For that, there was a canoe. I was usually going out alone, but SIL Loretta visited me there and someone took some pictures of us, so there were two people in the canoe that day.

Then there were these automatic samplers that pulled one sample each day. Battery operated, and the sampling bottle was larger than the usual small ones. Each unit was about the size of a 55 gallon drum. The top snapped off, and they held a circle of bottles. The cover snapped off.

And then you lifted off the battery housing. Under there was where the bottles rested in a ring around the edge.

So that makes 4 samples from each pond, which would be 24. Seems like there were 27 in each batch, but I'm not sure why I think that. Maybe the river at the pump, the river below the final outlet, and somewhere else?

Stay tuned for what happened to these 81 samples that were collected every week.

Meanwhile, if the weather was hot, I also took care of watering the test plots that were the project of the other couple- the ones that had less well-established plants. Chips loved to play in the sprinkler!

And where was Chips when I was collecting the other samples? Right there with me, of course. He got to be quite the canoe dog. I have no idea how he managed to stay put on the slopey prow of an aluminum canoe, but this was his favorite perch. He was beginning to show his desire to always be "top dog."

I also have a funny story about something he learned the hard way. We were coasting in to the shore where I would pull the canoe out, and the surface of the water was completely covered with green duckweed. He thought it was solid and leaped onto it as if it were land. Imagine his surprise when he got a complete dunking and came up totally green!

In other news: It's quite a bore, even if important to do- I edited, I wrote, I walked to the post office.

Total miles hiked in 2024: 169.8 of which 52.8 is North Country Trail

See The Cast of Characters

Summer of 1993 - The Cast of Characters

 I did find a good picture that shows the space where we worked. Along the entrance drive were three trailers. The one with a pink arrow was the office. The one with the yellow arrow is where I lived. They actually were very glad to have me stay on site. There wasn't any particular security problem, but they were happy someone was there in case something came up. The blue arrow points to the laboratory trailer. An awful lot happened in there.

The green arrow points to some test plots. And you can see a couple of the ponds nicely in this shot.

There were a few people who were there every day. This couple... I think her name was Cathy, but I don't remember his, were doing research as to how well wetland plants grew under various conditions. I really don't know a lot about their research, or I don't remember. I do remember they owned a cat named Typha. If you get it, you get it.

They always had various plants growing in tubs with tags all over them, and they were constantly monitoring those test plots with the green arrow above.

The other person who was there almost every day was a man named Ike. I think he might have come from Iran, but I don't remember for sure any more. Anyway, he had been an engineer in his home country, but was having trouble passing the exams in the U.S., so he took any jobs he could get that were in his field. He was my best friend of the summer.

Basically, if something had electrical components, it was Ike's job to maintain them, take various reading, etc. Here, he's downloading measurements from our weather station that was at the top of the tower.

There was an archeaologist there part of the time. The site where the ponds had been built had all been checked before that was constructed, but there were other properties where he was looking for native artifacts. I don't remember his name, either.

I got to go with him a couple of days. If I recall correctly, I didn't find any actual arrowheads, but I did find a few pieces of worked chert. He would collect all day, then come back and catalog all the findings.

And then, there was me. Remember, I was a research assistant. I had a long list of duties to perform, and I really enjoyed every minute of what I did there, although a lot of it was quite simple. More on that another day (or two).

And puppy Chips. Don't forget Chips!

In other news: I finished scanning all the slides from Wetlands Research, Inc., I edited, I wrote, I did some housework.

See The Playing Field

Summer of 1993 - 1

 Tonight is just going to be a teaser. I did my quota of editing and writing, a couple of other bits of work, and then started scanning slides that I've wanted to digitize for a long while. But it takes a fair amount of time to do them. However, I got the project about half done. I won't be showing you all the pictures. Some aren't very good, or there are a lot that are similar.

I'm going to take you back to the summer of 1993. I had just completed my first year of grad school, at the University of Michigan, college of Engineering. I'll tell you more about what I was doing as we continue, but here is where I spent the summer, at the DesPlaines River Wetlands, Wetlands Research, Inc. It's in Illinois, but very close to the Wisconsin border, about four miles inland from Lake Michigan

I've always said this was the best summer of my life, but now it has to compete with the big hike Dec '21- Jun '23. Apples and oranges. Anyway, there I was.

Tonight I will tease you with puppy pictures. Chips was only 3 months old when I went to live on this site in May. We cleaned up an empty trailer and lived there for four months. My Cat's Meow sleeping bag was brand new! I was only barely introduced to the North Country Trail. Marie and I had taken one 3-day backpacking trip in 1991, and a couple of day hikes. We had hoped to do a long hike that summer, but Marie had broken a bone in her foot and although it was healed, she didn't think she could do the weight of a backpack. More on that later.

I had my first real car (I'd owned a couple of beater vans before then). It was a Dodge Colt Vista, and I loved it. Chips did too. As long as he was with me or in the car, he felt safe.

I will tell you that he locked me out of the car once.

Tomorrow, I'll get the rest of the slides scanned, and begin telling you about that summer.

See In Memory of Hoover Houdini Chips

A Little Help and a Puppy Fix

  I needed a groove cut in two boards for the trailer project, and I just don't have the tools to do it. A friend with a table saw to the rescue. Thank you, Jesse!

I really appreciate this because there is no way I could have gotten these done so nicely on my own. You'll see where these go in a couple of days- or maybe more. It's supposed to rain now for two days, so that will put the trailer work on hold. Don't worry, I have plenty of things I can work on in the house.

While I was there, I got an excellent puppy fix. They have a King Charles Spaniel. I know they are small dogs, but the puppy is amazingly small. Just one handful. I got lots of kisses and snuggles. Her name is Sally, and here she's being held by Jesse's daughter, Josi.

In other news: I edited, I got some groceries, I worked on the trailer. Progress was made, but it just goes so slowly.

See A Tiny Puppy Fix