Denver, March 31

Friday we left my parents' house. I went to Denver with my mother to
get my eyes examined. I have been experiencing a lustry sheen around
light objects in my right eye. It makes rooms look steamy, and gives
lightbulbs a hazy corona. The technician went through all the rigamarole of
testing my vision and predicting a glasses perscription, and then the
ophthalmologist came in, a cheerful fellow named Jamell. I described my
symptoms, and he had me lean into an apparatus that shone
intensely-colored light into my eye. It seemed to fill my head with a rich, deep
blue. "Well, I found the culprit," he said with a puzzled look. "But I have
no idea why it's there." Apparently in the stroma of my cornea, which
is the space between the outer and inner layers of the thick transparent
cover of my pupil, some rogue cells have been depositing pigment in an
unusual mosaic pattern. Dr Jamell was genuinely surprised and at first
could offer nothing more than an uneasy shrug. He posited a couple of
hypotheses, but recommended I see a cornea specialist. He also requested
me to let him know if I get written up in a medical journal.
On my last trip overseas, I contracted an unknown disease while wading
in Costa Rican swamps. It too had doctors puzzled, and vast quantities
of my blood were withdrawn and sent to the four corners of Pathology. I
had a widely fluctuating fever and incredible pain in my trigeminal
nerve, and various other unpleasant symptoms. But in the end they could
make no diagnosis, and it went away. So I already have some experience in
medical professionals telling me they don't know what's wrong with me.
But this is my eye! This is an organ I make very frequent use of. Is
this a part of the aging process, the vision growing dim? My hair is
growing gray, why not my cornea grow milky and occluded? It seems to soon
for that, I'm only 31, and I still need both eyes for a long time yet.
My brother-in-law, an anaesthesiologist, helped me with the procedure
for making an appointment at Oregon Health Sciences University during
the short window I'll be in Portland before departing for Finland.
Apparently they have a whole Cornea Lab.
But then, I got to thinking: an unusual pattern on one eye only? What
if this is a special pattern? Some kind of mystic rune, burned into my
eyeball, that will create for me the proper lens to see my true path? So
I wrote this letter to Dr Mathers, the cornea expert who will be seeing
me in Portland next week:
Dear Dr Mathers,
my name is Arthur Pelegrin and I have an appointment with you on April
11th for an examination of an unusual condition in my cornea. My
ophthalmologist Dr Jamell said there was a mosaic pattern of pigment
deposition on the endothelium of my right corneal stroma. Such a condition was
outside of Dr Jamell's familiarity and he recommended seeing a
specialist, and you certainly qualify. My question, before my examination, is:
is there any way I could get a photograph or otherwise-image of the
mosaic pattern that is occluding my vision? I am very keen to know what
shape is in my eye. Thank you very much and looking forward to meeting
you,
AP

Buffalo Creek, CO

My parents live in a very dry, fire-prone forest, but there is a drainage near their house that occasionally contains running water. On a previous visit I had found some very attractive caddisflies in an apparently-perennial pool a couple miles down the drainage. They had constructed their shells using flecks of iron pyrite, giving them a golden lustre. Unfortunately the previous specimens I collected ended up in the poisonous claws of a cacodæmon, and I never had the chance to key them out. There is a deep and satisfying pleasure in keying out aquatic insects, and I wanted the shell. Here is a picture of the very beast in question: But we were unable to find a single one, and I decided it would be a good idea to dam up part of the stream closer to my parents' house to create good caddisfly habitat. I planned to do it the next morning, but when morning came: SNOW! In late March, a quick 4 inch accumulation and continued snowfall throughout the day. At first it seemed like a good day to stay inside, but it wasn't actually that cold, so we seized shovels and headed back to the creek. An energetic little dog called Evy joined us, though her mind was fully occupied with the acquiring and fetching of sticks. This proved to be somewhat problematic when we tried to make a wooden backboard for our dam - every piece of wood we picked up, she thought was a candidate for a game-piece, and wrestled us for it. Or, she would chase large rocks we rolled down the hill, causing us to cringe in anticipation of her being bruised, brained or bloodied. Somehow we also mixed up our order of operations, and plugged the stream up before hollowing out the pool that was about to form. I tried to do this after the water started backing up, which made some excellent squelching noises but wasn't very productive. The proper way to do it would have been to don sandals and stand in the middle of the puddle, but the weather did not invite this procedure. Even still, the reservoir we formed was of good size and depth, and well-shadowed to slow the evaporative processes when summer came. I will come back to the spot in the future to look for these beautiful creatures.

Gray's River to Colorado, 26-27 March

After unloading most of my junk into an outdoor shed at my friend Luke's house, we hit the road for Colorado. We drove East up the Columbia River Gorge, stopping in Hermiston, OR to meet our friend Kim for Thai Cowboy lunch. I had seen cowboy-themed restaurants in Thailand, but never a cowboy-themed Thai restaurant in America. In any case the food was excellent, and I left several small sapling asian pear trees with Kim for later retrieval.Onward, with a stop in Twin Falls, ID for a creditable Chinese buffet (though their fried shrimp were the texture of modelling clay) and then turning south, through the I-15 corridor in Utah. Salt Lake City, the same as every time I've driven through, had its section of I-15 under construction. This was fairly late at night, and they had intense stadium-lights illuminating the many parts of the road that were being "worked on," though we didn't see any actual workers. We didn't see much of anything, actually, thanks to the lights that shone like suns straight into our eyes. It was bewildering and disorienting, and we were glad to leave the freeway for a winding road through the national forest. We stopped at Diamond Creek campground and just spread our tarps on the ground and went to sleep. The next morning we woke coated with a sheen of ice, and, not anxious to pay for a camp spot, quickly departed. We stopped in Green River for chicken-fried steaks at a truck stop, then muscled our way up the Colorado Plateau and down the eastern slope to my parents' house in Buffalo Creek.

Portland the First, 23-25 March

Cousin Julia is a sweet and forgiving soul, and made no comment whatsoever on my tangled hair, my crusty car, or my generally haggard manner. She was visiting from Texas for the weekend to see Portland and environs. We started out looking for the fabled Pearl District, on the recommendation of a friend, but could not seem to find any distinct street or set of streets that shouted "Pearl!" in any way. A light drizzle began, and Julia promptly acquired a new umbrella with red birds on it. A pair of young persons under an awning informed us that we were indeed in the Pearl District - an odd combination of art galleries, antique shops, and great faceless warehouses. We eventually found an imports store with bright flags outside and giant carp and cranes painted on the floor. It contained quite a collection of oddities and artifacts, from Asian temple decorations to elderly postcards. Some of the items looked to be looted from reliquaries, others mass-produced for the tourist trade. After a bit more wandering around, we found our way to dinner at an outstanding Chinese restaurant called Mandarin Cove. Their Mongolian Beef was superlative, just the way Temujin would like it, and all future beeves will be compared to it and found wanting. Next day we drove West, to the Uwajimaya superstore in Beaverton. This is a colossal Oriental supermarket I used to shop at for odd items like turnip-shrimpspawn buns with rapeseed oil, water caltrops, and Navy biscuits. Today I noticed the bookstore in the back for the first time, and found a package of "tribal" temporary tattoos, which I bought. I also got a pair of hideous Japanese sodas for my niece and nephew. I was pleased by the ample fungal selection in the produce section, but having no kitchen or refrigerator, declined to purchase any.We headed further West to the Pacific coast, and the weather worsened from a steady drizzle to a steady drumming rain. A sign advertised a local spot of interest that contained the largest Sitka spruce in America, but upon stopping the discovered the spruce had been beheaded in a ferocious windstorm that swept the county last fall. We reached the coast at Cannon Beach, an artificially-quaint town with an array of tourist-related businesses. As we walked toward the coast itself, strong wind turned Julia's umbrella inside out and the rain began to soak her, so we turned away from the stormy might of the Pacific and sought refuge in a gallery. We returned outside to search, unsuccessfully, for a restaurant serving crab cakes, and settled for pizza instead. On Suday we explored the Hawthorne District, and then Julia caught a plane home, and I headed North to Gray's River, Washington.

The Journey Begins

I finished grad school in January, receiving a Master of Science in Zoology at Oregon State University. After three and a half years in the town of Corvallis, I am ready to journey forth into the world and test my mettle. What will become of me? This question is oft-asked by my friends and family, in the form of "What will you do next?" I know not. I have no comfortably-arranged position to slip into. All the dice are rolling.My journey began after a week of frantically trying to reduce my physical belongings to two carloads. There was storm and stress around the house. For some reason I decided to host a potluck for Nauroze, the Persian New Year, two nights before I had to have my room cleaned out, my first carload packed and ready, and the second safely sequestered in the garage. Trying to spiffy up the house was trying. Then the bulb in my laptop burnt out, during the "backing up" process, and I had to spend over an hour on the phone with a slow and stolid tech support guy in Salt Lake City, to determine that in fact the bulb had burnt out and would need to be replaced. Then my roommate came home and informed me that the bed in my room would need to be dealt with, as the new resident had a bed of his own, which added an extra dimension into the next day's choreography. My guests came, and what a lucky pot we ate from! There were pistachios and grapes, soup with doughy nubbins, sushi salad and Phad Thai, gummy gnocchi and a bottle of Italian Moschato, given to me by my friend Captain Garceau. It was a delightful gathering and left me lazy. I toyed with the idea of moving my bed into the garage, but reflected that I would then need to sleep in the garage, a mecca for incontinent rodents. So I left the bed where it belonged, and slept until six am Thursday. I was due to meet my cousin in Portland on Friday at 2pm, leaving me thirty-two hours to clear every object out of my room and somehow deal with it. By ten am Friday I was heaping stuff into garbage bags and slinging it up onto the pile of junk on the bed in the garage. Unwashed, unrefreshed, and with no sleep, I climbed into my crammed car and drove up to Portland to meet my cousin.

A foray through the fornices

This is a mere test to see what will happen.