Where it all went squee-jawed

October 13, 2026.

Between 2007 and 2009, I found time to explore the forests and streams of the San Francisco Penninsula. I found more time after my anger nearly consumed me. The fire in the belly had re-ignited in a big way.  I owe thanks to C.J. Ralph for that phrase; our connecting flight to Arcata had been cancelled due to bad weather, and we briefly shared a rental car at a chance encounter at the San Francisco Airport around 2010, where I instantly recognized him by his saunter. Some people have it. He feigned recognition, a very polite man. He talked with me for hours while I drove and finally remembered who I was after some time. In distant hindsight, I was entirely missed, and undoubtedly why can be partially attributed to a saying an old-fart businessman told my father in front of me, when I was 16, that I was "too big for my britches." I would rather be remembered for the good I have done, but, if I am remembered by how much of a pain in the ass I am and forgotten for it, so be it. I'm in good company.

I had gone many years without thinking outside of the next big thing on the internet, from  1994 to 2009.  Why did I let go of the life of a budding evolutionary biologist, a field monkey of peerless talent? I got tired of living below the poverty line and getting by with savings cards with debt limits (Visa bait and switch cards, circa 1989). Putting your heart and soul into an endeavor that doesn't pay you enough to afford food, gas, car payment, car insurance, tuition, rent in a place not crawling with degenerates, and baseline healthcare does not make for a happy existence, is indentured servitude, and it drove me crazy. It's like being a fundamentalist christian geologist raised on creationism, studying the folds and layers of the earth; you can't reconcile the two. The desire to not live hand to mouth and field biology does not mix. I made a choice, and told my co-worker and friend Lisa Fann that someday I'll be able to pay others to do the work. She laughed. The short laugh. I haven't heard from her in years. She, like me, got a raw deal, and we moved on from conservation biology, one of the most thankless and under-recognized careers in science.

I did not work for C.J. directly. I worked at his and others direction and discretion at a small-project level within the USFS Redwood Sciences Laboratory in Arcata, California, on the Old Growth Project, the grand endeavor of the lab from its inception in the very early 80s. I worked there when I was a precocious 17 year old to 22 pain in the ass.  I got my break from Bob Ziemer who founded the lab. More stories, someday. Time does make the heart grow fonder, thank you, Amy Lind, for that stinging barb. I am very proud of the work done for the Old Growth Project and have the utmost respect for all involved even those I ended up loathing for decades afterwards. It was a hellish endeavor, and worth every ounce of energy and anguish. Maybe not for them, but for me, it was. To be able to see the lands conserved and protected, where I worked hard to gather ecological data and dig the critters from the earth, under extreme conditions, and now am witlessly denied permission to access, is ironic, but the big picture makes it all worthwhile.

In 2010, my late wife and I purchased a home by the Deem Hills, in Phoenix, Arizona.  I had been researching Dunn's lost Arizona plethodontid salamander specimens; research with books, historical travels, notes, and fieldwork, not the modern Appalachian American kind that supplanted the honorable endeavor.  There are no known native Arizona plethodontids, and it is an obscure subject of intrigue for herpetologist nerds like me. It was a nice late winter day, probably in March. I decided to go for a walk, and instead went clambering straight up a steep talus slope full of jagged blocks of dark basalt, all the while imagining salamanders beneath all that insulative stone presently at a pleasant soil temperature and humidity on that day. Instead, I encountered a white snail shell adhered to a boulder, wedged in and shaded by a small flowering herb. That was the last thing I thought to find that day, upon the slope of a fully exposed basalt mesa covered in saguaro cacti and cholla, facing due southwest.

The next day, maybe even that very day, I called an old supervisor from Arizona Game and Fish Department.  From 1992-1994 I worked for Mike Sredl and Jeff Howland at the nongame branch herpetology department. I gave Mike a call and found myself chatting with Jeff Sorensen soon after, who had inherited the invertebrate department as well as managing fisheries, and completely understaffed.  I had no idea what I had found and was quite perplexed, to whit he told me I may have a Phoenix talussnail, Sonorella allynsmithi, and that it was only known from Piestewa Peak and the McDowell Mts.  Here I was almost 15 miles (24 km to the metrically superior) northwest of the type locality.  Some context is needed now, yet another tangent is coming for you, and more will follow.

I was born in Arkansas, and we moved to be with the rest of the family due to... reasons... when I was barely a month old.  We were in Trinidad, California, at my uncles for about 10 months and my first memory was of being nose-to-nose with a Pacific giant salamander (Dicamptodon tenebrosus). Babies can't have memories, I'm told, but I was probably convincingly told of the encounter and I project it as a memory.

We moved to Hollywood, and for the next seven years I explored the concrete jungle from ground, dumpster, hi-rise, and roof level. You can find some amazing things in dumpsters and back alleys. At five, I decided to go to the Hollywood Hills sign. A four-year old friend came along until we reached Highway 101, and then I continued onward, alone. I remember coming home with a cup filled with tadpoles that I'd collected from a canyon stream while a woman looked on, probably wondering what I was doing alone. I imagine I was probably in trouble, but I don't remember. If it had been my kiddo I would have been utterly frantic with my eyes bulged out.  I do remember coming down the canyon watching the sun set, and the golden reflection from our apartment windows. I also recall a katydid, perched in a shrub next to the shed and block-wall I scaled for a shortcut, behind the apartment building. Tadpoles and toads from the Hollywood Cemetary were a highlight of my time there, our closest thing to nature we could get to, because we didn't have a car the whole time we were there from 1969-1977.  It was only an odd special occasions when we went to Griffith Park, and relatives came to visit us. Record skip. Wait a minute. A five year old wandering away from his home without parents or supervision? Dear reader, once upon a time children would play outside without karens bleating at us because we picked up a rock or caught a moth. I am not exaggerating about the karen. It is true that I escaped out of sight even though my dad told me to play in front of the apartment building with the other kids. It is true that I, on my own accord, made the decision to go on my own, hell or high water, and that is just the way business gets done, and it's the way I get things done today. If it had been 100 years earlier, I may have been mercifully eaten by a bear. The real danger has always been people, and I've had some extremely close encounters, but I've managed this far. I'm still here and back again to speak my truth.

When I was eight, we moved back to Trinidad. I grew up in the forest with redwood, sitka spruce, douglas fir, and alder. A stream flowed downslope through a skunk-cabbage bog. The ocean and sea lions roared from a mile to the west, behind the dense cover of fog and trees, while double-trailered logging trucks continuously and noisily thundered by our front road and then upon the fresh gleaming Highway 101 whose construction left huge chunks of tar and asphalt in our drinking water and 100 feet less property line. We to this day still find gobs of now cold, eroded tar.  Bigfoot and bears were a real and present danger, I had been told. And I, dear reader, was often afraid of the boogeyman.  For good reason. But like the reckless youth I was, and modestly reckless adult I am now, I kept the fear in mind but did the things anyway, rather than cowering and hiding in my bedroom as a normal child would be expected to do.

Banana slugs (Ariolimax columbianus) are everywhere, in Trinidad. They get into everything, leaving slime trails and other organic gifts. I did not have a positive relationship with molluscs at that time. My bias was amphibians. But seeing that amphibians, namely my beloved tailed frogs (Ascaphus truei), Olympic salamanders (Rhyacotriton variegatus), Pacific giant salamanders and plethodontids were nowhere to be found, and I was high and dry in Phoenix, I went all in on sorting things out with this snail.