Like a Stamp Collection

Teachers teach the goals and standards established by the states in which they teach. A goal in most states is to condition students to the prospect of “life-long learning,” the idea that learning never stops. Teachers are the best practitioners of it. That’s because they have to keep going to school to maintain certification. The album of transcripts citing the undergraduate and graduate credits I’ve collected over the years while a teacher looks like the album that stores my collection of my pre-1940 plate number block “FDC’s” or first day covers. That’s right. I’m a stamp collector. An FDC, by the way, is an envelope franked with a block of U.S. stamps along with selvage that has the number of the engraving plate used to print the stamps and which is cancelled on the first day of issue.

I can’t decide which of the two collections is more valuable.

Much of my eclectic schooling took place in a small town called Corvallis, Oregon, “Cornvalley,” to the locals. Oregon State got its start in the nineteenth century as one of the many land grant colleges, meaning that the government gave land to states to set up colleges to train farmers and prepare school teachers. It started out as an “aggie” college. Agrarian arts curricula over the years gave way to research in the pure life sciences, and that’s what I wanted to learn in the ‘70’s.

It didn’t start out that way. With nothing more than a vague notion about living the life of a forest ranger, I left high school in Virginia to learn forestry in the misty coniferous timber lands of Oregon.

But industrial forestry, figuring out how to grow lots of trees so that they could be cut down, was not in keeping with my nascent environmentalism, freshly minted by Earth Day 1970, the year I graduated from high school. I just couldn’t stomach forest mensuration, the math of acre board feet while still on the stump, and aerial photointerpretation, visualizing those board feet from above.

I began dropping the tree chopping courses and picking up the mushroom, fern, liverwort, and hornwort biology courses. I wanted to learn especially forest floor fungal ecology. I wanted to mesh with the mist permeating the ancient temperate rain forests of the Cascade and Coast Ranges. I wanted to go on field trips to gather moss and lichen, and look under dissecting microscopes at the Lilliputian world of these little green and brown creatures. So I became a botany major.

Botany attracted a strange brew of alternative types, such as a lady friend named Sue who in 1975 ran away with The Two, otherwise known as Bo and Peep, the leaders of the Gnostic new age UFO flying saucer cult called Heaven’s Gate. In 1997 when the Hale Bopp comet appeared in the sky, she was the last of the 39 members of the cult to die by poison as they prepared to leave the fallen Earth and transcend to the Next Level, brought to bear by the comet.

Of a more conventional type of alternative, there was a long-haired fellow who I remember snuck some pot he was growing into lab one day to admire under magnification the flower buds dripping with potent resin. He said that marijuana, Cannabis sativa, is a dioecious species, with separate male and female plants. He told me that the flower buds of the female plant produce the greatest concentration of tetrahydrocannibanol, the active ingredient.

But I was more interested in liverworts, primitive plants that have genomes almost sixteen times larger than humans. This extra DNA grants liverworts many unique powers including the ability to sing a cappala in a pinch and bake cookies.

The things I learned as a botany major!

The Willamette Valley is still filled with alternative types of folks today. Pictured above is a scene from the recently concluded gypsy carnival held each year in a wooded area near Veneta, OR thirteen miles west of Eugene. I like the vintage VW microbus campers that parked there. I do remember that it was the pot dealer guy who told me about another botany major who also ran The Rainbow Repair, a garage in which I had my first Fiat fixed when it began to leak oil out the rear main seal onto the exhaust manifold, frying it and sending it up like smoke from a bong. But that’s another story.