The Weirdest Log Cabin Sunday Yet
I was free to move about the cabin
Let’s get the big news out of the way: I didn’t observe Log Cabin Saturday. This was a test of the whole ethos to tell the truth, as I flew to Denver on Sunday for the International Conference on Ecology and Transportation. I will talk about that later, but I wanted to get the whole LCS of it all out of the way.
Saturday ended up being a social media day after all because I knew I wouldn’t have a lot of time for the housekeeping side of what I do online while being in conference mode. It also meant I needed to do some last minute arrangements with some folks I hoped to meet up with once there that I wouldn’t be able to do while traveling.
On the big day itself I didn’t break any of the rules I had given myself at the beginning of this experiment, but I did use my phone. Since starting this, I usually leave the phone on the nightstand and don’t even touch it until Monday morning. I thought about being a total weirdo about this whole thing and doing the same thing while going to an airport I’d never been to and taking a train and bus in a new city. Those are all things I could have done in 1998 without a smartphone. I could have printed a boarding pass and asked at the counter for a map and followed signs and all that. Maybe it would have been fun. I don’t know. Travel gives me a sour tummy even when smoothed by modern technology.
So I used the Delta app and Google Maps to find stuff. And I recorded some footage to create a social media video to be posted the next day because an opportunity presented itself that could not have waited. That opportunity was to do a little interview with personal hero and author Ben Goldfarb. You can see it here (I regret the thumbnail image):
What I didn’t do was use social media, stream any music, or watch the in-flight entertainment. I will not make the same mistake a CBS reporter did and say that I raw-dogged travel, but I did journey without the emotional prophalaxis of non-book distractions.
The book I read was John Green’s Everything Is Tuberculosis. It was good.
ICOET is an interesting event for me. On the one hand it is generally thrilling to be surrounded by people who know what my job is. Being surrounded by conversation that is so focused on my expertise and experience is a heady cocktail. On the other hand, it is constantly terrifying.
I struggle being surrounded by people with PhDs. I even had to look up which letters you capitalize in PhD (I was right the first time at least). I have a lot of management experience and have seen some neat stuff get built in my time, but I don’t have the deep academic background of many of my colleagues. Or even some of the fresh-faced 20-somethings out to solve every single problem in the world. In situations like these I try to just listen as much as I can, though when I talk about what we’re doing here in Utah people do get genuinely enthusiastic so that’s nice for us.
I’m only a moderately good networker. That means that when I’m talking to someone I know who introduces me to someone I don’t, I can handle myself just fine. But it also means I can’t strike up a conversation with any old stranger. I just don’t have the gumption. The first couple of days I spent in kind of a crisis of confidence. I often spent a long time looking at the tables with my plate of lunch in hand, hoping to find an empty spot next to someone I knew. If I didn’t, I ate alone.
My wife was able to attend along with me, which was immensely helpful as I often get profoundly lonely at these things, but I still had to handle a lot of the thing alone as she did things like tour art museums and the Denver Mint and I tried to understand the statistical portions of many, many talks.
About halfway through I had kind of gotten into a stride and had met enough new people and glommed onto some old acquaintances that I was able to muddle through and eventually feel like a road ecologist. I feel OK about it now, but I’m glad this is every two years because that’s how long it takes me to forget the bad parts and just glamorize how much fun I had.
I come away from events like this much more optimistic than I do going in, even when the topics and presentations are about incredibly thorny and difficult topics. I love being around people who are staring right in the face of things like ecological calamity and rolling up their sleeves to do something about it. Like the story of the man throwing starfish back into the ocean, each of these people are saving animals on an individual basis, hoping that it adds up. They’re also hoping that other people are doing it, too, all over the world. Spoiler: they are.
I saw artificial canopies in the Amazon rain-forest that conveyed primates safely from one side of the road to the other. I saw a presentation about ocelot crossings, and ways that researchers are trying to work with the government to make the border wall passable for wildlife. I saw a lot of neat wildlife crossings and learned new ways to tell their story. We talked about the unsung animals that still need to cross safely: little frogs and lizards and mice and pollinators. I love that someone is thinking about each little gal and telling their stories. I’m inspired.
Some highlights include the aforementioned meal and visits with Ben, meeting some other great content creators I’ve only known from the internet, meeting some very smart people who (wisely) are not content creators, and finally seeing black-footed ferrets at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge. You can see that video here, too:
A note on Denver: it rules.
At least what I saw of it does. We were pretty centrally located downtown so the art museum was a short walk, as was a lot of fun places to eat. Because there were a lot of socials and events associated with the conference, I didn’t get to explore that much but I sure liked what I saw. One of the things I saw was a Rembrandt painting! And a bunch of impressionists even I have heard of: Van Gogh, Monet, Manet, Renoir, Whistler, and more. And the indigenous art exhibit was absolutely amazing.
I wish I could have put out the word that I’d be there and meet up with some people I know from social media, but I had so little time. Hopefully I get to come back for fun next time. And more nachos.
Fun to read, and thanks for the honesty about networking. Glad to hear you were both free to move about the cabin. Also, yay, art museums and visiting downtown Denver. Cheers.