Cross-country skating

For the first time in my life, I wish the winter wouldn’t end so soon.

Also for the first time in my life, I am going to write about sports.

You see, I am not a sports person. I hate spectator sports. I get bored with competitive sports after one hour tops, usually much sooner. The longest I can tolerate any sport is a full day of downhill skiing once in a few years. The only sports I can enjoy even longer are ones that allow me to get to interesting places – like cross-country skiing or mountain climbing. But that’s not really sports for sport.

Yet this year I kind of came up with a new sport and enjoyed it. It’s cross-country skating.

It’s not entirely new. Skates were invented in present-day Finland about 5000 years ago, likely by hunters, for travel across frozen wetlands. Finland was a perfect place for that: the country is a labyrinth of sprawling lakes, slow rivers and large swamps.

But then skates became toys… and now I was probably the first person in centuries to use them for their original purpose. It was absolutely amazing. Later I found out that cross-country skating is actually a popular thing in places like Alaska and Scandinavia under the name “Nordic skiing”. People there use long-bladed detachable skated and ski poles. Well, the same thing can be independently invented many times.

Unfortunately, I bought skates just as the winter was coming to an end. Today is probably the last day for safe cross-country skating before the weather becomes April-like. Fuck the fossil fuel industry and the politicians it owns.

But I did manage to do some exhilarating late night runs along frozen rivers in Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, and one on Delaware River. It only works on broad, slow rivers, large lakes, and open marshes where ice is smooth and snow gets blown away by the wind. Nights are better because they are cold and you are not in danger of being “rescued” by overzealous police or park rangers.

You don’t have to be a great athlete, but you need to be reasonably sure-footed and know the basics of travel on ice. It takes only a few minutes to learn to jump over cracks and avoid bumpy patches.

The difficult part is finding good access. Sometimes you just park near a small bridge, drop a ladder on the ice and climb down. Sometimes you have to ski down the riverbank. But once you are on ice, it’s just pure fun.

You slide swiftly across the glassy, snow-rimmed surface that sparkles slightly in star- or moonlight. The air is sharp and crispy, and keeps you cool and fresh no matter how fast you run. The forest is dark and silent, but dry reeds whisper quietly even in slightest wind. The only other sounds are the high-pitched hissing of your skates, the occasional cracking of ice, and very rarely a distant song of an owl or an alarm call of a startled deer – they don’t recognize the sound of skates as steps and sometimes let you approach very closely. But most animals stay in the relative warmth of dense woods on cold nights, and seldom show up on open shores. Once in a few hours you see a dead bird or some other carrion frozen in ice, surrounded by tracks of mink, raccoons, foxes, ravens or fish crows. It’s very easy to cover long distances, even with a backpack (although I haven’t yet tried it with a really heavy one). My leg muscles hurt afterwards, but I hope it’s only until I get more practice.

I now think of my brief exploits as proof-of-concept tests. Next winter, weather and family obligations permitting, I’d like to do a long skating trip somewhere in Canada, ideally to circle Manicouagan Meteor Crater along its ring-shaped lake. That’s about 220 km; after some training I could probably do it in 2-4 days. I haven’t camped on ice or snow in ages, but wouldn’t mind a skills refreshment, and it’s a beautiful part of Quebec, so why not?

Why do Ukrainians call Russians “orcs”?

The answer to this question seems obvious. The entire Russian invasion of Ukraine looks like a screen adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. An empire built on fear, hatred and slavery is trying to conquer, enslave and destroy the free peoples of the world. There are hordes of dumb, ugly, and profoundly evil human-like creatures bringing death and destruction to peaceful inhabitants of a beautiful land for no reason other than those creatures’ manic obsession with murder, torture, rape and plunder. But this simple explanation is not all of it. There’s more.

To a native speaker of Ukrainian – a musical, poetic language – 21st century Russian sounds like Black Speech of the orcs. Now, Russian is my first language. I learned it in the early 1970s, and only later understood how terrible it was compared to the same language a hundred years earlier. In the 19th century, Russian was a rich, expressive language with dozens of regional dialects. Vladimir Dal’, a pioneering linguist, spent his life documenting that richness, and his dictionary contains 200,000 words, most of them now lost. Since 1917, Russian has been devolving in the way brilliantly described by ever-insightful George Orwell in his often-overlooked appendix to 1984. Within 50 years, Russian language began to sound exactly like Orwell’s Newspeak. Local dialects were displaced by Moscow dialect, bureaucratic jargon became the colloquial norm, and foreign words overwhelmed the language’s ability to incorporate new words and still sound natural. When I traveled extensively in remote parts of Russia in 1983-1996, it was still possible to hear all those wonderful dialects in villages and even a few towns. But they were already dying.

Of course, Russia wasn’t unique. Loss of linguistic diversity during a country’s integration and centralization is nothing new. Linguists call it koineization after koine, the Athenian dialect that largely displaced other Ancient Greek dialects in the later Antiquity. Most modern countries have undergone the same process or are going through it now. France cracked down brutally on its linguistic diversity. In Britain speaking “BBC English” has long been a pre-requisite for a successful career. But in Russia this has been pushed to a different level. Loss of lexical richness was so severe than some topics, such as human reproduction, became almost impossible to discuss. Working-class people mostly switched to talking in mat, a primitive jargon with just a few dozen words, all formed from four roots (curse words for penis, vagina, a prostitute, and having sex).

During my lifetime it kept getting worse. Starting in the 1990s, there was a massive influx of words from fenya, the slang of Russia’s well-organized and structured criminal underworld. As former thieves and racketeers became ministers, politicians, and ultimately the president, their language became the norm. The few people who still remembered what proper literary Russian was like – book editors, teachers, literature experts – emigrated, died of old age, or became homeless in the new robber baron-dominated economy and froze to death while digging through dumpsters. At the same time, Russia’s break-up with the West was weirdly accompanied by a deluge of English words, often mangled and mistranslated. I speak fluent English after living in the US for almost thirty years, but modern Russian is increasingly difficult for me to understand because recently acquired English words often don’t mean what you expect them to.

As the country entombed itself as a paranoid absolute monarchy based on crony feudalism, and its invasion of Ukraine turned into an endless quagmire, the censorship rapidly tightened and became much worse than in the Soviet times. You can now rot in prison for using the word “war” instead of “special military operation”. And it’s never clear what you are and aren’t allowed to say, so the language becomes so convoluted that it makes Orwell’s newspeak sound normal.

Unusually, Ukrainian has escaped that fate. Throughout the centuries of brutal Russian occupation and cultural genocide, Ukrainian writers, poets and linguists have constantly worked – often risking their lives – to preserve their language’s richness and diversity. A relatively small, modern, well-integrated country with pre-war population of just 40 million, Ukraine still has a lot of regional dialects, and all of them are supported, celebrated, and actively spoken. Of course, this makes Ukrainian a bit more difficult to learn. Russian invaders find it pretty much impossible, and that puts them at a disadvantage: all Ukrainians can speak and understand Russian but no Russian (except for older villagers in Belgorod, Rostov and other provinces stolen from Ukraine a century ago) can speak or understand Ukrainian. As a matter of fact, it is extremely unusual for any ethnic Russian to speak even a few words of any of the other languages of the former USSR or the Russian Federation. Russians always considered themselves a superior nation, and learning any language other than basic English, German or French was beneath them. All they have is their Black Speech.

But that’s not all of it, either. There’s more yet.

Tolkien’s books were once supposed to be published in the Soviet Union. The Hobbit was published in 1976 and immediately went out of print (my late grandmother, who spent her last years patrolling the bookstores hunting for good books that were extremely difficult to get, managed to procure a copy for me). The Lord of the Rings was already translated and scheduled for publication in 1982-4, and the first part was published, but then Reagan made a speech that supposedly referenced the book in comparing “the land of the free” and “the land of shadow” (it actually didn’t, but that’s what Soviet censors were told, or so goes the story that I’ve heard many times but never managed to confirm). Anyway, the publication was cancelled, but the book, particularly the first volume, circulated in samizdat, and got a small but dedicated fandom. In the late 1980s it finally became widely available (in hilariously bad translations) and immensely popular. And Russian readers immediately began to identify with the orcs.

Tolkien has always denied that any of the countries in his books had real-world prototypes, but for Russian readers the similarity between Mordor and Russia was too obvious. They recognized themselves in the orcs and were proud of it. Role games based on the books became a favorite pasttime among Russian teenagers (in the 1990s it was nearly impossible to walk through a city park without encountering a croud of wooden sword-weilding kids), and everybody wanted to be an orc. Numerous fanfics in which orcs ultimately win became as popular as the originals. This popularity seems to have declined a bit recently as younger Russians don’t read much, but there’s still a lot of people who think of themselves as Tolkien’s orcs. That doesn’t explain why so many Russians sign up to die in a senseless war, puzzling the entire world with stupidty and lack of basic self-preservation instinct that make slime molds look like geniuses. But it does tell you a lot about Russians and their contemporary culture, or lack thereof.

So when Ukrainians call Russian invaders “orcs”, it’s not racism, or profiling, or stereotyping. It’s stating the truth, on so many levels.

Venezuela

Venezuela is currently used as America’s main distraction from the Trump-Epstein files, but it turns out many people have very little idea what kind of country it is, so let me tell a bit about it. I’ve been in Venezuela three times (in 1995, 2007 and 2008) and traveled over pretty much all of it, except for offshore islands. I know a few people who live there and a few who used to travel there regularly.

Venezuela is a magical place. It’s a country a bit more than twice the size of California, with great climate and population of just over 30 million. Its southern part is tepui country, where humongous table mountains rise from savanna or pristine rainforest, each one with a unique “lost world” on the summit plateau, with weird caves, breathtakingly beautiful waterfalls (one of them almost a kilometer tall), bizarre rock formations, clear lakes, and alien-looking plants and animals. There is more rainforest in the northeast, and more savanna in the center, plus a branch of snow-clad High Andes in the west, another bunch of gorgeous mountain ranges in the north, picture-perfect Caribbean coastline, the mighty Orinoco river with a wild delta, a patch of cactus desert in the northwest, and ridiculously high biodiversity, much of it unique, everywhere. I’m pretty sure under competent government Venezuela could do very well even if it didn’t have oil, just on tourism. Unfortunately, it never had a competent government.

Venezuela had a difficult and bloody history of European colonization, first by Germans in Spanish service, then by Spaniards themselves, followed by equally difficult and bloody 24-year fight for independence (the first two attempts squashed by rural armies loyal to the Spanish king) in which half of the population of European descent lost their lives. Then an endless chain of dictatorships followed. In 1958 the country became democratic and enjoyed a brief period of prosperity during the oil boom, but corruption and falling oil prices quickly plunged it back into poverty and social unrest.

When I first traveled there in 1997, the country was poor, but not particularly bad by South American standards of the time. People were still driving huge American cars from the 1960s, but tourism was rapidly growing, and everything was more or less working.

Just two years later, Jugo Chavez came to power. He was a leftist and initiated a long list of social reforms that made him immensely popular in the country, except among the elite. In the first few years of his rule, oil prices were very high and things looked great. But that didn’t last. When I returned to Venezuela in 2007-2008, I immediately saw the warning signs that reminded me of the last years of the Soviet Union: lots of stores and offices closed with no explanation, empty shelves in supermarkets, people not interested in any work whatsoever. Gasoline was subsidized so much that many people kept their trucks and buses running all night for no reason. Chavez kept moving the country further and further to the left, well beyond anything reasonable. He also failed to normalize relationships with the US (an essential trade partner for reasons I’ll explain later), and made friends with Cuba, Iran, China and Russia. The only things those countries could teach him were violent suppression of dissent and building crony capitalism.

Chaves died in 2012, late enough to see the country unraveling and plunging into poverty. His death was kept a secret for a few months. By that time all branches of government were fully under the control of the dictatorship. His chosen successor was Maduro, a former bus driver and a Cuban intelligence agent. Maduro didn’t even try to make things better for the people of Venezuela, who by that time were living in desperate poverty and emigrating by millions. He stole all subsequent elections and stayed in power by inviting Russian experts in state terrorism, bringing in Cuban security forces, and sharing profits from drug trafficking with his generals. His government gradually lost control of huge swaths of the country: the west is now ruled by Colombian guerillas turned narcocartels, the south by rural self-defence forces, and the capital mostly by street gangs. Moreover, many government functions were taken over by hundreds, if not thousands, of Cuban “advisors”.

It’s pretty obvious some of Maduro’s generals sold him out; it’s also obvious the Cubans were not informed. I hope Maduro rots in prison or is someday extradited to free Venezuela and executed – the fate every dictator deserves. But it remains to be seen if his removal will change life in Venezuela for the better. So far, Trump, a fellow dictator/criminal, has left the rest of Maduro’s gang in power, and, of course, he is the last person to be expected to restore democracy and the rule of law. Trump will probably insist on kicking out Cubans and cutting the supply of free oil to Cuba, which will immediately leave the island without electricity and transportation (Mexico helps them a bit but not enough). That might lead to Cuban regime falling, but not necessarily, and if it does fall now, it will most likely be replaced by a collective dictatorship of American billionaires favored by Trump.

Venezuela has world’s largest oil reserves, but its oil infrastructure has mostly fallen apart and will take many years to rebuild. Moreover, its oil is very dense, and needs additives to be of any use. The only countries with large refining capacity for such oil are the US and, to lesser extent, China. But the only reason the US is interested in that oil is Trump’s dementia. Increasing oil output from Venezuela would immediately undercut American shale oil producers, because shale oil is even more expensive to pump and refine. Oil companies not invested in shale oil could conceivably profit from it in the long term, but with demand for oil peaking and cheaper deposits being developed elsewhere, it’s not a particularly attractive long-term investment.

So the future of Venezuela (and Cuba… and the rest of the world) really depends on one thing: our ability to rid our own country of the criminal gang ruling it – the so-called Republican Party.

The Great Loop

Many years ago I drove once to Labrador (in September) and once around Newfoundland (in July), but that was before the road connection between Goose Bay and Blanc Sablon was completed, making it possible to travel around all of Canada’s eastern provinces in one long loop. I wanted to do it for many years, but this winter my wife heroically agreed to man all the stations while I travel for five carefree days. Our plan was simple: I’ll load our car with skis, snowshoes, clothing and other essential winter gear for the entire family, drive the Great Loop (calculated to take 60 hours of driving plus 10 hours of ferries), meet her and the kids in the airport in Québec City on Christmas Day, and enjoy a few days of more conventional vacationing together before driving back home.

It all went well until I got a cold a few days before departure. That wouldn’t be too bad except this particular virus caused severe eye inflammation, which I didn’t fully realize until after the first 11 hours of driving (from New Jersey straight to New Brunswick). So here I was, red-eyed like a mongoose, walking around Fundy National Park in ice-cold wind and driving rain, trying to shield my face while looking for interesting fauna in tidepools. I secretly hoped to find some lumpsuckers, but there was nothing in the tidepools except some kelp and periwinkles, plus the water was too full of silt kicked up by tidal currents (Bay of Fundy has the world’s highest tides, up to 16 meters). The only vertebrates I saw in the park were a long-eared owl and a very fluffy raccoon, both crossing the road. My consolation prize was “discovering” a nearby place called Hopewell Rocks, with really cool formations created by those same currents (if you ever plan to visit, check the tide tables: at high tide the whole area, the rocks and the canyons, is completely underwater). Another good thing was that thanks to being sick I had zero appetite and could save some time on food stops.

Next I was planning to go to Prince Edward Island National Park, but the weather was so crappy and my eyes so bad that I decided to skip it and went straight to Cape Breton Highlands National Park in Nova Scotia, hoping to spend the night there before the first ferry. (My original plan was to take overnight ferry to Newfoundland, but it was all sold out because the one before it had been cancelled due to the storm). By the time I got to Cape Breton, the wind was still bad and the rain got a lot worse. I drove around the entire park never seeing another car or any wildlife except for a few miserable-looking foxes and ducks, realized that getting out of the car for more than five minutes would probably cost me my eyesight, and ended up in North Sydney (the ferry departure point) 15 hours before the departure with nothing to do.

So I changed my plan and instead of sleeping in the car checked into a hotel. By morning I felt much better, my eyes no longer looked like gunshot wounds, and the rain was almost over. As I drove to the ferry, I spotted a pair of fish crows on the roadside. There are two species of crows in eastern North America, not very closely related but looking a bit similar, with many minor distinguishing features none of which are obvious or 100% reliable, except for the calls. The American crow, the larger species, is abundant in Nova Scotia, but the fish crow is only now expanding its range into Canada. It has been seen in Nova Scotia a few times, but only one 2024 record was officially accepted. Finding a pair was quite remarkable. I stopped the car, drove back a bit, and got good binocular views of the birds, but when I opened the door to take a photo it was too much for them and they flew off. I reported them on eBird but my report is still listed as “unconfirmed”. It had taken me some time to learn to distinguish the two species when the are silent; I’m pretty sure local birders usually don’t notice fish crows when they see them.

The ferry was huge, but it still rolled a bit in the storm. The sea looked terrible but was full of birds (gulls, eiders, murres, razorbills, dovekies), until we got about 40 miles out, where the only living things were a few fulmars and one flock of Canada geese also trying to make the crossing. By that time we were also out of phone reception, so the passengers started to talk to each other and that was so cool! I joined one of the groups, and met a guy who is a sniper in the military and is assigned to protect various dignitaries visiting the province so he had personally met a few presidents and presidential candidates. Looks like the prevailing opinion Canadians have about Americans nowadays is that (1) we can’t be trusted with any valuables, or be allowed to approach small children to within 10 m, (2) half of our country is gearing up to attempt killing the other half, and (3) we are committing an economic suicide and trying to take as many countries as possible down with us. Remarkably accurate! The fear that Canadian economy will collapse because of American war on reason was palpable, but I’d read enough of economic data to know that Canadian economy was actually in pretty good shape and very resilient compared to most others. Anyway, after a few hours we were back under cell coverage and all conversations quickly died out. It was dark when we docked at Channel-Port Aux Basques on Newfoundland.

I was planning to drive across the island to its northern tip in about 8 hours and then get some sleep. At first all went well. I stopped for a short forest hike in Gros Morne National Park; didn’t see much wildlife except for some moose on roadsides, but it was still great to walk through the forest of snow-covered balsam firs in soft winter light.

But then I crossed to the western coast, and into a blizzard. It went on and off; sometimes there was almost no snow and I quietly rolled along an immaculately white road, occasionally sprinkled with tracks of fox, snowshoe hare, moose, ptarmigan, and rarely ermine. But most of time it was so bad that I couldn’t see much even with fog lights. The drive took 12 hours instead of 8, and the strain on my eyes was so bad that soon they looked and felt terrible again. As I got to the tundra at the tip of the island’s northern peninsula, a humongous Arctic hare, looking too fluffy to be real, solemnly trotted across. Finally I got to Cape Norman Lighthouse, on a windswept hill overlooking the Labrador Sea and Belle Isle, and caught an hour of sleep before dawn. The view I saw when I woke up was worth the suffering.

The sea was freezing near the shore, with rounded golden “pancakes” of new ice gently rocking in the waves. But just a bit out it was white with foam, the black water barely visible, the wave crests torn off by wind before rising. A few bergy bits rapidly floated by, pushed by the gale like tiny tea clippers. And in this chaos of cold, wind, and angry water there were birds – lots of them, all flying east with the wind at insane speed, but each species still maintaining its distinctive flight style. There were a few species of gulls, flocks of eiders and long-tailed ducks, and tiny dovekies that looked like white-and-black moths. After a while I spotted some rarities with my scope, too: a greater skua and then a small group of ivory gulls, the world’s “northernmost” birds that look remarkably similar to snow petrels of the Antarctic – I hadn’t seen them for over thirty years. I was secretly hoping for a Ross’s gull: there is a small population of them that winters in the Labrador Sea according to satellite tracking data but is never observed there. But that would be too much luck.

On the way back from the cape I ran into herds of woodland caribou, busy digging their feeding craters in the snow. They were remarkably tame and I walked with them for a while. Interestingly, some males still had antlers. Normally only female caribou retain their antlers in winter, supposedly to be able to defend their feeding craters from males, as females are mostly pregnant this time of year and need more food. That even led to speculation that Santa’s reindeer must be either girls, trans individuals undergoing hormonal therapy, or animals from introduced population in South Georgia, the only one in the Southern Hemisphere.

I stopped in L’Anse-Aux-Meadows (the famous site of a Norse waystation dating back to ~1000 AD) to look for gyrfalcons (none present) and in St. Anthony to get fuel, and drove to St. Barbe for the ferry across the Strait of Belle Ille. It was a small ferry and a beautiful ride, with the shores washed in pink evening light, the few early ice floes dotted with seals (slender white-and-black harp seals and massive silvery bearded seals), and flocks of mostly white guillemots flying across the bow. It was again dark when we docked in Blanc Sablon, the last Québec town on the coast. In a few minutes I was back in Newfoundland and Labrador province, and drove for a few hours, making brief stops every thirty minutes to let my poor eyes rest.

It was a beautiful cold night, with bright starlight, sparkling snow, and snowshoe hares grazing on the roadsides. I got to Cartwright, parked on the bayshore, got out all eight sleeping bags I had, and prepared to get some rest. But my nose was so stuffed that I kept waking up. Around midnight I opened my eyes once again and saw an aurora – not very bright but very dynamic. There was a green curtain hanging over the islands to the north; and from that band emerged pulsating ripples of light running amazingly fast across the sky. They reminded me of rapidly moving dark and pale stripes that some cuttlefish produce on their faces to hypnotize shrimp. I’ve seen videos of auroras like that before, but assumed that they’d been sped up. The whole show was reflecting in the snow and the freezing sea, and it was absolutely magical.

I realized I couldn’t sleep, decided it was time for a little adventure, got dressed, put on my skis, and ran across the frozen mouth of Sandwich Bay, from one island to another. I had broad fur-lined skis that slid really well across snow-covered ice; in an hour and a half I was on the other side, in Mealy Mountains National Park. It’s the largest national park in eastern North America, created just recently and with no road access – you normally need a boat or a snowmobile to get there, except for that one winter skiing option from Cartwright. I spent a couple hours there, and saw only a hawk-owl and a few more hares, plus a beautiful sunrise with sundogs and nacreous clouds – but the park is definitely worth some serious exploration. It has its own population of woodland caribou, a few wolf packs, and even some Arctic foxes.

I returned to the car and kept driving. My eyes were a bit better now. A major snowstorm was forecast for the next day, but for now it was sunny and calm. The new road was excellent – smooth, wide, almost free of snow, and empty. In a few steep places it was sprayed with sand, and these places attracted birds – mostly redpolls but also white-winged crossbills, pine grosbeaks and occasionally Canadian jays – looking for small pebbles for their gastric mills. In September you can see blue and ruffed grouse on that road, storing up on pebbles for the winter. There were no hares during the day, and ravens patrolling the highway quickly removed the few roadkills. But now lots of willow ptarmigan, also in their gorgeous winter leathery, emerged from their snow dens. One has to see those fluffy hares and grouse happily enjoying their brutally unforgiving habitat of snow, ice, granite rocks and stunted black spruce to understand the true meaning of “cuteness overload”.

As I enjoyed the scenery and the smooth ride, I thought of my wife with gratitude. It was her who in 2013, after a lot of research, suggested buying a little-known new car model called Subaru Crosstrek. The choice proved excellent: the car was perfect for travel, the only one which I could drive for days and never feel back pain, one that I never managed to get stuck anywhere, great for any place and weather, fuel-efficient, reliable, and, most importantly, comfortable to sleep in.

I passed two small towns and just before sunset turned onto Esker Road, an unmarked road leading into upland habitat where wolverines and three “northern” species of rodents are known to occur. I walked along the road for a while, and saw the only rock ptarmigan of the trip, plus a few boreal chickadees, but there were no rodent tracks at all, and I realized that I hadn’t seen any since crossing to Newfoundland. No foxes, either. It clearly wasn’t a good year for rodents, but an excellent one for hares, and probably a second one in a row because I noticed a lot of lynx tracks. When I returned to the main road, I started seeing the lynxes, too. They were calmly crossing in front of the car and gracefully hopping over the snow piles lining the shoulders, but only one stayed long enough for me snap a photo. I ended up seeing eight Canadian lynxes that night – more than in all my years in North America – but only one fox; in a normal year it would likely be the other way around.

In Labrador City both gas stations were out of gas. Fortunately, I still had some, and the next town was just 30 km away (usually on that road they are 200-400 km apart). On the other side of the town there is a little road leading up the slope of Smokey Mountain. It’s the highest point on Trans-Labrador Highway and the only one with easily accessible tundra. I decided to explore the area and immediately noticed lemming tracks. After half an hour of walking around I spotted a gorgeous white Ungava collared lemming with my thermal scope. It was the only animal I found with the scope on that trip; in a few places there were warm spots that looked like flocks of ptarmigan sleeping under the snow, but I didn’t check them to avoid flushing the birds in the middle of a very cold night. By the way, on the Smoky Mountain my car thermometer recorded the lowest temperature of the trip, -32C/-25F.

Soon I reached the border of Québec, et la route s’est dégradée. Il s’est remis à neiger, mais ce n’était pas trop gênant. À l’aube, je longeais en voiture le bord du cratère Manicouagan. Il s’agit d’une structure annulaire de 100 km de large, créée par l’impact d’une météorite à la Trias supérieur. Un barrage hydroélectrique a inondé la région, créant un lac circulaire avec une immense île en son centre. Le lac est à peine visible depuis la route, mais en hiver, on peut facilement le traverser en raquettes. Je n’ai aperçu aucun animal sauvage sur l’île, à l’exception d’un écureuil roux. Mais sur le chemin du retour, j’aperçus un autour d’Amérique volant au-dessus du lac, porté par le vent. Son vol était rapide et puissant, ponctué de quelques glissades. Il se déplaçait en suivant un schéma de recherche, tel un ange de la mort, et disparut bientôt dans un tourbillon de neige.

Quelques heures plus tard, la route descendait vers Baie-Comeau, la première vraie ville. Puis elle longeait la côte du golfe du Saint-Laurent jusqu’à Québec, avec une courte traversée en ferry du fjord de Tadeussac. Je me suis installé à l’hôtel, j’ai pris une douche, je me suis rasé et j’ai pris la voiture pour l’aéroport afin de retrouver ma famille. C’était agréable de passer cinq jours à vivre la vie pour laquelle j’étais né, mais il me fallait maintenant reprendre le vie normal.

Zootopia 2

Last night I took my family to see Zootopia 2. We all absolutely loved it! I virtually never watch movies twice, but this one has to be seen on big screen and then at home where you can pause and re-watch, because there are lots of hilarious micro-jokes impossible to catch otherwise. The plot is good (there were a few twists I had to explain to my 5 year-old son), the animation superb, the characters really cool.

A little disclaimer: I was a consultant for the movie (my name is in the credits, yeay!). A long time ago the team contacted me to help them make sure the snakes were anatomically, physiologically, behaviorally, and biomechanically accurate. I was really surprised by their attention to this. And the snake looks great! Every scale is in place, the movements are fast and precise like they usually are in arboreal species, the personality is calm, shy, very patient, and a bit inward-focused, as typical for pit vipers (spoiler: the snake has to be a pit viper for the plot to work). The snake uses Tibetan emergency warming technique that is unknown even to most Buddhists, not to mention reptiles, but I’ve learned and tried it myself and can confirm that it works.

Anyway, I am recommending this movie not because I am so proud to have made a small contribution (which I will brag about forever) to its creation, but because it is really, really good.

Anchovies

Last Friday I went diving and found myself in a humongous aggregation of tiny anchovies. There were millions of them, they made it nearly impossible to see anything. But my troubles didn’t end there.

On Saturday I dried my diving gear and hung in a closet. It happened to be the same closet where my mother-in-law keeps her jackets. A few hours later she informed me that the closet – and everything inside – was reeking of dead fish.

So I got to work fishing rotten anchovies out of my gear. There were about 20 in the BCD, a dozen in the regulator (which I had to take apart), a few in the snorkel, etc. It’s been three days and I still can’t remove them all, so the stench persists.

It will be a while before harmony can be restored in my household.

Back to Japan

I spent two months traveling around Japan in 2008, lived there for two years in 2017-19, and this summer came back for a month. It felt, surprisingly, like coming home. I still remember the intricacies of navigating the immense three-dimensional maze of Tokyo and the best choices in vending machines. I still feel intellectual pleasure from discovering countless bits of wisdom – smart technical solutions, brilliant details, hidden inventions – that make the country run better than a Swiss watch*. (The non-virtual part, that is. Most Japanese websites still look and function as if they were designed in the Edo Period.)

During the six years I was away, Japan has made it through the COVID pandemic and other challenges, but it changed very little. There are more Westerners and mainland Asians living and working there now, particularly in Tokyo. Bullet trains run 19 seconds late on average, down from 23. Blue rock-thrushes and azure-winged magpies have moved into even the most treeless downtown areas of cities. The typhoon season is a few weeks longer; the summers a few degrees hotter. The yen has lost even more value than the dollar. Tokyo traffic got slightly less terrible thanks to massive tunnel construction. The number of wild animals you see per hour of night driving has approximately doubled (not surprisingly, as the average age of hunters in Japan was already over 60 seven years ago). Google Translate works a lot better nowadays. Even more houses in rural areas have been abandoned – a welcome development for all wildlife but particularly bats, and one of many benefits of Japan being among the first countries to successfully reverse the catastrophic demographic explosion of the 20th century. The summit of Fuji-san becomes snow-free in June, not July. Cheaper sushi restaurants are now almost completely robotic.

Yes, sushi restaurants, we’ve been to so many of them. My family LOVES sushi. Every time we go to Sushiro and the stack of empty plates on our table grows skyward faster than US budget deficit, the locals watch us first with curiosity, then with amusement, respect, and ultimately horror. As a matter of fact, my kids love most of the hardships of travel in Japan: sleeping on the floor, eating raw fish, soaking in the sea all day long, not using toilet paper**, spending hours on bullet trains, being treated like adorable kittens by the natives, playing in warm rain, having to learn various traditional crafts in museums, and periodically getting lost in labyrinthine shopping malls doubling as train stations.

Of course, no matter how much time you spend in Japan, it keeps surprising you. I managed to rent three different cars despite my international driving license having an obviously wrong expiration date. One of the talks my wife delivered at math conferences was a grueling 2-hour affair densely packed with arcane proofs of very complex theorems; in an American university it would make all attendees quietly leave, fall asleep, or jump out of the window, but here everybody kept listening, asked good questions, and at the end gave her the highest praise possible, commending her for giving the talk “Japanese style”. A ninjutsu school in Tokyo let both my kids (the younger is 4) practice with real shuriken (my daughter proved absolutely deadly while my son was better with swords, impressing the sensei with his ferocity). The most beautiful Shinto shrine I’ve ever seen was completely devoid of tourists, local or foreign. And in another small miracle, my diving guide managed to find three species of seahorses, including a pygmy seahorse the size of a staple, on a dive with 20 cm visibility. (It’s nearly impossible to rent tanks for diving without a guide in Japan, but the guides are all excellent – the problem is that most dive shops serve only Japanese speakers.)

One thing that absolutely blew me off, coming from New Jersey this time, was the number of insects. Even in the concrete hell of downtown Tokyo you see large moths circling lights, shiny chafer beetles attending flowers, and various dragonflies patrolling the skies. In the countryside the difference is even more stunning. Small balcony lights of our hotel on Izu Peninsula attracted more large insects each night than I see in New Jersey in a year. The climate is similar, the light pollution is equally terrible, human population density on Honshu is roughly the same as in New Jersey, and pathogens get introduced both ways, so it must be something else – perhaps Americans’ habit of hiring gardening companies to douse their lawns and shrubs in pesticides, the more carcinogenic the better? (As we all know, in contemporary American culture turning your land into a dead zone is considered patriotic while trying to keep it – and yourself – healthy is woke).

Other than sushi-bar hopping, this trip was a bit boring for me. My wife was traveling for work, and I had to stay nearby with the kids, so I didn’t get to any of the places in Japan I’d really like to get to. Instead I was stuck for weeks in large cities which I generally hate (I’d always rather be in Shintuya than in Shibuya). But there were nice moments: spending some nights and mornings away from populated areas, climbing mountains, scuba diving and snorkeling a few times (my son learned to snorkel on this trip), watching my family enjoy it all so much, getting stuck in traffic in a rapidly flooding tunnel during a rainstorm (funny as it sounds, at 57 I still crave adventure in my life), seeing some plants and animals I hadn’t seen well or at all before, and meeting a couple local naturalists I’ve been friends with online for many years. Besides, any travel is better than no travel, at least for me.

A few Japanese phrases for use in conversations and tattoos:

バカ 外人 私は (baka gaijin watakushiha) – I have deep respect for Japanese culture.      

私は靴を履いたまま寝ます (watashi wa kutsu o haita mama nemasu) – I know I should take off my shoes indoors.

私はフライドチキンとフライドポテトだけを食べます (watashi wa furaidochikin to furaidopoteto dake o tabemasu) – I’d like to try local cuisine.

便器の中に水飲み場があるのが気に入っています (benki no naka ni mizunomi-ba ga aru no ga kiniitte imasu) – Japanese hotels are very comfortable.

日本語と中国語は同じだと思います(nihongo to chūgokugo wa onajida to omoimasu) – I’ve read many books about Japanese history.

P. S. One of the pleasures of writing blogs in our age is that you don’t have to explain anything because it’s so easy for your readers to look it up.

* My daughter says “Nobody knows what a Swiss watch is anymore, just say quantum computer”.

** Toilet paper is for fish-eyed barbarians. Japan is a civilized country so most toilets have in-built water jets.

And now a guest blog post by my daughter.

So, I lived in Japan for 2 years as a kid, but all I could remember was the sushi (which did NOT disappoint). Then, 6 years later, we went back.

At first it was awesome. Tokyo looks like and honestly is 50 years ahead of the rest of the world. It has skyscrapers as tall as the ones in NY, and you use trains to get everywhere. But then I started noticing that there were some bad parts about living in a city like Tokyo.

One day, when we were staying inside a weird mall-hotel combo (don’t ask) there was a huge rainstorm, and the entire thing flooded. The elevator broke and we had to trudge down eight flights of wet stairs just to get dinner!

But there were good parts in the vacation too. Me and my dad still argue about this TO THIS DAY, but he brought a LIVE HEDGEHOG into our hotel room while we were at the Izu Peninsula. We named him Vanilla and cuddled him for half an hour before Dad took him back into the woods.

We also spent (at least) ten times our original budget on sushi and souvenirs. Somehow, I came out of the trip with three plushies, a new suitcase, a bunch of pens and markers, and about six packs of corgi butt post-its. I know, I know, how productive.

One of my favorite parts of the trip was a few days before writing this, on a gravel beach about an hour away from the house we were renting for the week.

The beach was great, even though I had to put on water shoes just to walk around due to all the rocks. My parents took turns scuba diving for two days, and there was a floating jump deck where my brother and I perfected the Sea Elephant Jump. I accidentally fell into water two times in a single day, beating my record and nearly breaking some poor guy’s $10000 camera. But the best part came at night.

Every night, families would cluster together on the beach and set off dozens of fireworks and sparklers. It was amazing… until my little brother came too close to someone’s pyrotechnics and nearly got burned to a crisp. That was fun***.

Also, it turns out that the Seven Elevens n Japan (or Seven & Holdings, according to Japanesians) have SMOOTHIE MACHINES. No, I’m not kidding. Honest-to-goodness SMOOTHIE MACHINES. You buy a special container full of frozen chopped fruit, stick it in the machine, and BAM. Smoothie. It’s like magic.

Even more like magic, just before leaving Japan, we went to the one and only glowing fish house. Turns out the only Deep Sea Aquarium in the world is in Japan. There were long lines just to look at the fish and the entire trip would have been pointless if not for Gunkan, a deepwater octopus plushie we got from the gift shop. He’s awesome.

Another place that we visited was Sushiro. That’s not saying much, considering the fact that Sushiro is basically Japanesian McDonalds. But this one was different.

Instead of the usual tiny ordering tablets, there were two-sided huge TV-like screens. They were about seven by four feet and had games where every time you ordered enough sushi, you would play one of three luck-based games. We ended up winning three times and got three toys as prizes, which we named Maverick, Frederick, and Roderick. As you can probably tell, I came up with the names.

In conclusion, no matter what my dad tells you, the trip was worth it, even if it left me broke (then again, going into the trip, I had exactly $12.43 to my name, soooo…). 5/5 stars, would visit again. It was awesome.

*** Sometimes my daughter sounds like Wednesday Addams. Even though me and my lovely wife are only superficially similar to Gomez and Morticia, and our son is certainly not like Pugsley.

Birding up

This year I did a lot of birdwatching.

I haven’t done it much since moving to New Jersey nine years ago. By that time I had seen almost all regularly occurring birds of the continent, and the handful I was missing never show up in New Jersey anyway. I am not particularly into chasing rare vagrants because for me it’s more interesting to see each species in its natural habitat. So there wasn’t much to do, even though the state has a few really nice birding locations. There is Cape May, a triangle of land pointing south so that fall migrants are funneled to the tip and gather there in impressive numbers; the Cape is also famous for spring gatherings of shorebirds feasting on horseshoe crab eggs. There is Barnegat Inlet, where you can watch wintering eiders, harlequin and long-tailed ducks, and other colorful waterbirds at very close range. And closer to my home there is a chain of small nature reserves along the double crest of Watchung Mountains, good for wood-warblers and other songbirds during spring migration. I checked these places out a few times, but didn’t get serious.

This year I realized that I could do it on a new level. Online record databases (eBird and iNaturalist for North America) made finding rarities much easier. I got a copy of A Guide to Bird Finding in New Jersey by William Boyle. Also, I installed a new free app called Merlin that identifies birds by sound. It has certain limitations (cell phone microphones aren’t designed for that), and makes some funny errors (for example, it mistakes green frogs for yellow-billed cuckoos, which explains numerous eBird records of the latter from open wetlands where they are very unlikely to occur). But it is fantastic for small birds with complex songs that are difficult to remember and tell apart, for untangling multi-species choruses, and for noticing some species that are easy to miss when birding by ear. Merlin allowed me to find and watch a few species that I had seen only briefly before, showed me that some birds such as cedar waxwings are more common than I realized, and helped learn difficult groups such as Empidonax flycatchers much better. (Unfortunately, at this stage it has complete coverage only in North America – in Hawaii it doesn’t recognize any native songbirds, only introduced ones, and in Japan it can’t identify even some of the most common species and keeps mistaking those t doesn’t know for those it does. It’s probably going to be at least a few years before you can use it in the tropics where it’s most needed.)

So I spent some delightful mornings in forests, meadows and saltmarshes, pretty much extinguished my “better view desired” list of local species, and… ran out of birds to look for again, so I had to move on to freshwater fishes, and those aren’t going to last long, either.

P. S. I recently read a book called The Birds that Audubon Missed by Ken Kaufman. Highly recommended for everyone interested in birding, the history of zoology, and nature’s never-ending mysteries.

New Jersey

In our wonderful state of New Jersey, the main airport is all but paralyzed, bus/train system is on strike, and two main freeways are blocked by sinkholes. But life here is not all gloom and doom. This morning I escaped to a nearby park for two hours of birding and it was a near-tropical experience: hot, humid, foggy, drizzly, a few small agile mosquitoes, and an exuberantly green, dense forest (in a deer exclosure). I even got authentic rainforest-birding neck pain from looking up into the canopy. Some of our summer birds look totally tropical, too (the ones I was after do not, but are cool nonetheless). Alas, I’ve seen all our bird species, and even my short “better view desired” list is rapidly shrinking. The one removed from that list today was the black-billed cuckoo: saw two of them in a tiny mixed flock with a yellow-billed cuckoo, rapidly annihilating a mini-outbreak of tent caterpillars.

Canadian dreams

We’ve just spent a few beautiful days in Canada, a country we all love. One night there I had a weird dream. In my dream, Trump invaded Canada, claiming that Americans and Canadians were the same people, that Nova Scotia had special sacred meaning for Americans, that Canada was on the verge of joining the EU, that the US needed land corridors to Greenland and Alaska, and that English speakers in Canada had to be protected from “Nazi” Quebecois. While hundreds of thousands of US soldiers were being slaughtered in frontal assaults due to extreme ineptitude of Trump-appointed generals, Canada sent all US citizens within its borders to an internment camp on Baffin Island.

Normally I would kill for a free trip to Baffin Island, but this time the gorgeous Arctic tundra was outside the barbed wire and we were inside. I would escape and cross to still-free Greenland, but it was difficult with two kids.

I woke up and told myself that Canadians would never do such a thing. But then I remembered that they could soon very possibly elect their own little trump named Poilievre, and wasn’t so sure anymore.

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