Big Year in a Small Space
This page started on 1/1/23 as the Plummer’s Hollow 200, a quest to detect at least 200 bird species in the Plummer’s Hollow eBird hotspot in a single year. The goal was reached by the beginning of November, and since then updates have been less frequent but continue on a weekly to monthly basis. The focus has become updates on new and interesting species, and the changes that occur year to year.
The Pennsyltucky Geographer
My mom then asked me “What’s next?” and at some point in 2024 off-handedly mentioned that I should write about my own experiences in the world, as they seemed to her to be more interesting, I think she said, than some of the travel narratives she’d been reading. Hence The Pennsyltucky Geographer.
Never out of the woods yet
When I was a child, my Pop-pop had me pegged for an engineer, but I secretly knew I just wanted to be an explorer and roam the secret places of the Earth. My upbringing was as far from orthodox as you can get. My parents were Silent Generation, straight-edge hippie intellectuals, back-to-the-earthing it in an obscure hollow smack dab in the least interesting part of Appalachia. Mind you, it was certainly interesting enough for their three grubby boys, who were weird enough to have their own museum and an accompanying journal, The Screech Owl: Bulletin of the Bonta Museum. Pegged as a brain and ultimately consigned to the “Gifted” program in a working-class paper mill town, I could never really be a normie again after publishing my first scientific article at age 8 (“The Tadpole, the Teacher and I”, Screech Owl 1:13, 1977).
My brothers went in other, never normal directions. The oldest became a South Asian linguist, the middle one a poet, and the youngest—me—a geographer. I sang before I talked, and rarely talked at all before age 15, by necessity rather than choice in a boisterously intellectual household.
Millions have suffered before me
What defined me more than the encompassing woods and the walks I took with my naturalist Mom, more than the seemingly miles of books and classical LPs my librarian Dad stockpiled, was that I was an early follower of the Left-Hand Path. My kind had been beaten, tortured, and worse for centuries, smearing our written words, struggling to make sense of a world designed by right-handers. Long before I had heard of the Mysterium Magnum, I knew that the “official” version of the world was designed for some sort of vast majority I couldn’t be part of.
All this created what many today would label a dangerous mix of curiosity, open-mindedness, and free-speech absolutism. I remember hearing what Abbie Hoffmann said about shouting “fire!” in a crowded theater, and loving it. This bred a healthy respect for nihilism, anarchism, and post-structuralism and, what really saved me from a humdrum life, a kynic disregard for the State.
Leaving the taken-for-granted world
That last part was thanks to the long hours of “study hall” spent in the high school library back when we all assumed thermonuclear war with the USSR was inevitable. Completely by accident, I came across a book entitled The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence and discovered that most of it was blank. It had been censored at the behest of the Company. The world never looked the same after that, and even after the end of the Cold War, when I tried to forget the existence of the secret world, I ended up in places where it had left its ghastly imprints on the people and the land. The world never looks the same after someone extols to you the virtues of peeling off the faces of Honduran communist children to scare the rest of the villagers back to their senses.
So, yes, I went on live a rather unconventional life, blessed with a mind free of cobwebs, cursed to be told things I couldn’t unthink and witness things I couldn’t unsee. Murders, suicides, disappearances, conspiracies; kabbalists, kemetists, racists, hit-men and hit-ladies, and gangster kids painted up like ghouls; good witches, bad witches, and academic psychopaths; beloved students who went on shooting sprees or blew their heads off from PTSD; Mush-Heads and peabrains, rednecks and hillbillies and rebel priests with unhealthy predilections.
Years of wonder
Unceasing curiosity is also a blessing—it has taken me to many of the hidden places of the world and even to a few unexplored corners. From N’guigm’i to Coldfoot and Darwin to Gualaco, I have been blessed to be able to chat with fearless environmental leaders, free-thinkers, Noam Chomsky, future presidents, Teenek shamans, botanists as old as the trees, and long-dead geographers who never stopped pushing. I got to create national parks in Honduras, help discover new species in unknown cloud forests, serve in the Peace Corps, never shoot at a living thing, help make some firehawks famous, and doze, gratefully, on the dirt floors of peons during the coffee harvest.
I returned to my native hollow and hometown around the time of the great plague, freshly chased out of China for thought-crimes related to Geography According to Mao. Now I train artificial intelligence as it snaps at my heels, gobbling up the professions that recovering academic are qualified to do. It’s high time to try to make some sense of this mysterium magnum and to share it a bit more with the rest of the world. Enjoy!
Trigger warning: some of this shit is depressing as fuck, but I hope it balances out with the inspirational and wonder-filled episodes. Also, my typical defense for offending you is that my X generation’s pinnacle of achievement may well have been South Park.
