When I came across a boulder during a recent Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) trip with white streaks across its face, I wanted to know what type of rock would form a white streak in basalt. I was guessing quartz.

Turns out it was toothpaste spit, which, as it turns out, is not a rock.

There are reasons not to spit toothpaste on rocks in a wilderness area. In general, blowing out a big gob of white liquid violates leave-no-trace principles. If you use minty fresh Crest, the smell of mint might attract a bear. Some toothpastes contain sugar, or another sweetener, which can draw in all manner of critters. But what to do, other than to forego keeping one’s teeth polished, particle-free, and pearly white? And one’s breath minty-fresh?

I am as qualified to give dental advice as I am a geologist, but there are Reddit threads with tips on toothbrushing in the wilderness. In sum, Redditors advise to a) brush without toothpaste, b) spit into your garbage bag and pack it out, c) swallow your gob, or d) if all else seems unseemly, mix with water, give it a good spit spray over a wide area, far away from your campsite. I also suppose you could bury your spittle in your cathole, having it do double dooty (ha!).

Spitting into a large body of water – dilution is the solution – might seem like an answer, but the U.S. Forest Service worries that too much Colgate might interrupt a lake’s ecosystem. I would not spit in the latrine, and I don’t think more needs to be said about that idea, or about Ancient Romans using urine as a mouthwash.

One answer is using baking soda as toothpaste. No minty scent for fresh breath, yes, but no smell for bears, either. It won’t fight cavities, but sodium bicarbonate is a simple compound that breaks down easily – the first good rain will wipe it out – and it won’t kill you if you swallow small amounts. On the plus side, it will add volume and length to your belching regimen.

There is also an answer used by native peoples for eons: a chewing stick. Peel the bark off and gnaw down the end of a stick until it shows bristles; scrub away. Not all trees work because some – walnut, cherry, and yew around here, to name three – contain toxins. In the upper Midwest, a willow is your best tree for a chewing stick – recall that it contains salicin (the precursor to aspirin), so it may provide some pain relief for sore gums, but I wouldn’t count on it.

If my old geology prof is still with us and by some miracle is (still) reading this, please know that at least I kept an interest in rocks, if not any ability to identify anything other than a cracked geode. And none of this essay has the seal of acceptance of the American Dental Association.

-30-

I was tying up tomato vines that seemed intent on starting a career of their own when a small butterfly flitted past and landed on a volunteer zinnia. It was a painted lady, Vanessa cardui, and the colorful insect reminded me that even the most everyday fauna – perhaps some we take for granted – can be the most beautiful.

It might not be an exaggeration to say that almost everyone in North America has seen a painted lady butterfly. They are the most widespread of all butterfly species, found on every continent except Antarctica and, usually, South America. More about that in a moment.

Your experience with a painted lady may date back to middle school. (Some lesson plans refer to the insect as the cosmopolitan butterfly.) The butterflies are often used in science and nature classes to illustrate life cycles. They are a hardy bunch (and don’t cost much for cash-strapped schools) and are not picky eaters, but the big advantage for a teacher is that their entire metamorphosis happens in a two-to-four-week window, keeping the attention of even the squirmiest of children. And what kid doesn’t like a caterpillar?

The life experience of the butterfly is impressive. In one British study, six successive generations of painted ladies travelled from Africa to the Arctic Circle, perhaps as far as 9,000 miles. Unlike some other migrators such as the popular monarch, the painted lady is not usually seen on the move in huge numbers because it prefers a high-altitude path. Also, unlike others of its kind, the painted lady might take a year off migrating – perhaps to rest? – and can be erratic in its movements.

Back to South America: A 2024 article in Nature Communications tracked painted ladies from Africa to French Guiana, which is on the coast of the southern continent. Not only was the presence of the insect unusual in Guiana, but the researchers could come to no other conclusion than the little critters flew clear across the Atlantic Ocean. Was the painted lady the first insect to traverse an ocean? The trip was “potentially the first verified transatlantic crossing,” according to the scientists. It took between five and eight days and needed a mighty wind. That’s 2,600 miles in a non-stop trip. Hell, I get tired flying to Detroit.

As you can see from the hurried photographs I took, the butterfly is mostly orange and black on its dorsal side – perhaps there is a touch of baby blue in there – and duller tans and grays with a splotch of color on the ventral side. In our yard, it loves the zinnia’s nectar.

Pliny the Elder wrote about all butterflies in his 37-volume first-century encyclopedia, Natural History (Naturalis Historia), but he was slightly in error when he wrote that spring dew, in sunshine, on radish leaves condensed into a maggot, which grew into a caterpillar, became an immobile chrysalis covered in a web, and finally “bursts its covering and flies out as a butterfly.” That doesn’t happen, but Pliny remains an entertaining read 2,000 years later. The master classifier Carl Linnaeus labeled the animal Papilio cardui in 1758 – using the Latin papilio for butterfly and the Latin-derived cardui for thistle – and reserved the genus for all day-flying lepidopterans. A more detailed name came later.

When the zinnias are emptied of their nectar, the painted lady will move on. But I was happy to provide a rest stop for a weary traveler.

-30-

At the check-out counter, the proprietor had stacked two or three varieties of natural insect repellent, labeled with “no artificial chemicals,” “nature’s natural,” “organic,” or “non-toxic,” in packages of some shade of green. He knew his customers.

The displays did their job and caught the eye of my team, one of whom asked the older fellow manning the point-of-sale terminal what he thought of a particular natural bug dope.

“I love ‘em,” he said. “They are great!”

A couple more students gathered round, touching the merchandise.

“They only have one drawback,” the man continued.

“What’s that?”

“They don’t work worth a sh*t,” he said. “Buy DEET.”

And he was right.

DEET (N, N-diethyl-meta-toluamide) gets a bad rap in some circles, but it works. A synthetic chemical, it was invented during World War II to keep the mosquitoes off our armed forces in the jungles, and it hit the mass market in 1957. In the years since, other repellents have proved successful – picaridin for skin and permethrin for clothing – but none have undergone the years of testing and real-world experience as DEET has. It is the most-studied insect repellent in history. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that one-third of the U.S. population uses DEET at least once a year.

When used as directed, DEET is safe and effective. (Don’t drink it.) It should not be used on infants younger than 2 months old. For older children, no more than 30% DEET in the dose. Don’t put DEET on children’s hands to reduce the risk of accidental ingestion.

DEET does not kill insects; it works as a repellent by interfering with their ability to smell and locate humans. Many people mistakenly believe that DEET is effective against every type of bug, but that is not the case. DEET does not work against lice, fleas and stinging insects, including bees, wasps, and hornets. Some studies also suggest that products combining DEET and sunscreen may reduce the effectiveness of sunscreen. Other than that, you are good to go.

One of the students, a confident person in the ways of a 20-year-old, began a one-way detailed disputation with the clerk about the efficacy of oil of lemon eucalyptus (OLE), which has its supporters in the bug dope community. To his credit, the clerk listened politely to the polemic, said “um hmm” a couple of times, and sold an OLE spray to the young man and more to his friends. Green marketing is a powerful tool.

So is folk knowledge. A farmer told me he chewed garlic to keep the flies off; I don’t know if it worked on flies, but it did repel other farmers quite successfully.

As we left the outfitter, the clerk looked at me with a “what can you do” gaze and a very slight shoulder shrug. I nodded, and off we went into canoe country, armed with natural oils and lighter wallets.

-30-

We were in the “Set” zone on the “Ready, Set, Go” alerts that the authorities broadcast. Vehicles were packed and pointed in the right direction. There were two or three lakes between us and the nearest fire, called Camp, about seven miles away.

*

What we witnessed was only a tiny part of a much larger story. The current BWCA and nearby fires are historic both in scale and the response they have required.

Much has been written and broadcast about the fires, more than 25 of which were started by lightning strikes on July 6 and 7 during a major thunderstorm. The disaster has devastating consequences for outfitters, hotels, gas stations, bait shops, and liquor stores in canoe country. Individual businesses may lose tens of thousands of dollars, and the total economic impact will likely reach into the millions. Ely’s Blueberry Fest, which brings in almost 40,000 visitors in some years, was cancelled. For outfitters and other tourism-dependent enterprises, the losses could prove existential. Suppression costs alone will near $50 million. Politicians from both major parties are looking at state subsidies for those affected.

The fires have been burning in some of the most remote parts of the Superior National Forest and Canada. As I write this, the only structures destroyed were Forest Service outbuildings; no cabins or resorts have caught fire as up to 1,100 firefighters worked to keep the blazes away from people and their property. At its peak, about 36 planes and helicopters were on the job, delivering water, fire retardant, and canoes for the firefighters. Twenty-six days after the storm, the USFS estimated that the fires were 56 percent contained.

By August, the fires had burned more than 69,000 acres (110 square miles, the size of the entire Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota) on the U.S. side and another 8,000 or more across the border. Before it is extinguished, it will likely be the second largest fire since the creation of the Boundary Waters in 1978. The largest was the Pagami Creek blaze in 2011, which burned about 92,000 acres in the 1.1-million-acre wilderness and nearby. By coincidence, my family and I were camping near Missing Link Lake on the night lightning struck miles away near Pagami Creek, starting that blaze. We left the next day, wet from the storm but clueless about any fire. By the time we got home, the flames had spread.

The 2021 Greenwood Fire was the first time in 43 years the Forest Service closed the whole BWCA to visitors; this year’s fires were the second time the entire system was sealed off, for 16 days—two days longer than the full Greenwood closure. About 40 percent of the wilderness area opened on July 30 this year, in the eastern and central sections. More areas opened as suppression efforts succeeded.

The effects of climate change will only increase the frequency of major fires. Longer fire seasons, warmer temperatures, trees dying from new pests, and periods of drought are likely to multiply the severity of fires in northern forests. The debate will continue as to how to respond. The nature of any government answer, the use and placement of controlled burns, logging practices in the Superior National Forest, the let-nature-take-its-course arguments, and other flash points will intensify in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

In any discussion, it is important to remember that the ecosystem of canoe country has been shaped by fires throughout its history. For millennia, native peoples used fires to clear space for food production such as blueberries and space for habitation and travel. In the 20^th century, federal and state authorities instituted fire suppression standards, which seemed like a good idea at the time (Smokey Bear and all), but altered the forests and created hotter, larger blazes.

*

If the firefighters continue their successes, we will return later this month to finish our work near Ely. Recent rains have helped, but those with experience say that only the winter snowfall will put the fires out completely. “I tell my neighbors down in the southeast part of the country, it takes rain with a name to put out a big fire,” incident meteorologist Phil Manuel told radio station KAXE. Economic consequences will continue long after the smoke clears. Even when winter snow finally extinguishes the remaining hot spots, communities in canoe country will still be reckoning with the costs of a summer defined by fire.

-30-

On a recent trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA), about six days before the major fires broke out, our group encountered a dilemma. A common one.

After a portage of a bit more than a mile, along with a few shorter ones, Banadad Lake greeted us with light breezes and hot temperatures. The eastern campsite was open, although it was too small for our group of six. The next site posed the problem.

On a tree near the fire grate hung a faded red beach towel for all to see. No other sign of current habitation existed – no tents, no canoes, no packs, no rope, no nothing. Was the towel a placeholder for a group that was somewhere on the lake? Perhaps a fastidious bear just finished drying off? Did J.R.R. Tolkien’s Ents migrate here and bathe? Would a green towel mean Welcome?

Bernie, the moral theologian in the squad, said, “Never has a red towel overlooking a placid lake caused such discernment from tired and hungry paddlers… Does it make a claim on our conscience?”

Should we consider this site occupied? The short answer, in keeping with BWCA law and ethics, is no. A single towel, draped from a tree, is not sufficient to hold a spot for anyone. Nor, technically, is any other bit of camping gear. The U.S. Forest Service, which oversees the wilderness area, forbids the “saving” of a campsite by such methods.

Except… The language of the law does not include the words “no saving campsites.” The Forest Service can enforce a “no saving” ethic, however, by a section of federal law. It is the Unattended Property Law in the Code of Federal Regulations, which says in part: “Leaving personal property unattended for longer than 72 hours, except in locations where longer periods have been designated.” A left backpack on a site is “unattended personal property.” A ticket and the confiscation of the gear can result. But 72 hours?

The second section of law comes from the “first-come, first-served” canoe camping ethos and the definition of “occupied.” A site is considered occupied, according to the USFS, when the folks with the permit are actively camping on it. A hung red towel is not actively camping. It is drying out.

Now, I wish you good luck arguing the finer points of federal regulations with competing campers over a site, particularly if you travel in one of the few groups without a moral theologian. An increase in unethical and illegal behavior in the BWCA has increased since the COVID years, and such confrontations are more common. But the rules (and ethics of behavior) are clear.

At the same time, we know it happens when canoeists drop a pack off at an open site, zoom to the next one to check it out, and if open, then return for the gear. (Insert joke about wolves marking their territories here.) It would be hard to find campers who have not done that at least once. “Maybe someone just left the damn thing out to dry and forgot about it,” is the Occam’s razor answer, and he was a theologian, too, although not a canoeist, to my knowledge.

Being a group of conflict-avoiding fellows with half the crew on heart medications, we left the towel and paddled another stretch to the western-most site on the lake, only to find it taken. Backtrack we go. On our return trip, a comprehensive catalog of profanities was reviewed. We landed at what we now called One Red Towel Place, figuring we would deal with its owners when they slunk back.

In a bit of an anticlimax, over the next three days they never showed up. Which led to a question: Who leaves a red towel hanging on a tree for all to see? A question, an aporia, which will have no answer.

-30-

On the river, as we set out from Kynšperk nad Ohže, Dik sat in the bow and I in the stern. We had two large, heavy plastic barrels containing all our camping gear, clothing, and food; Petr and Libor drove solo boats with single barrels. The awkward, clumsy, bulletproof plastic boat is a common livery vehicle in this part of the country, take it or leave it. Given a choice, I would have left it, but I didn’t want to appear to be the American snob who was too good to be steering these bathtubs.

Dik, an experienced seaman who told me he sailed in a two-person boat from Marseilles to Corsica, was not nearly as happy in a canoe. About two hours into our river trip, we were less happy and a lot wetter. And glad of the watertight barrels.

The culprit was a channel, called a canoe chute or a canoe pass, built at the site of the first of four weirs (low-head dams) we came to. An English translation is “nature-like bypass.” It looked like a fish ladder, and engineers purposely leave rocks in these channels to help the fish go upstream while canoes go down. Whitewater experts probably rate it as a Class 2 under normal conditions (and don’t give it a second thought). Still, the river was a half-meter low according to one local observer, and the boulders and smaller rocks lurked even closer to our hulls.

We damned near (ha!) made it. I want to state that for the record. With about five yards to go and one big boulder in the way, it looked possible. However, we had too much speed, and I couldn’t get the canoe turned quickly enough, and BANG, we glanced off the boulder. Dik got tossed into the drink. On his way in, he caught the gunwale with a knee and hooked a rock with his paddle, and WHOOP, the whole operation was floating hull-side up, me included.

Since the water was only two feet deep, this was not a problem except for our egos. The barrels had stayed wedged in the boat, so we flipped the tub over and slunk downstream to a sandbar to empty it and wring ourselves out.

There, we encountered fellow travelers who had preceded us in the water, also upside down. A young fellow and his female companion had capsized in the same rapids and were a bit further along in their drying out. We sloshed up to them and exchanged the universal profanities, laughter, and head-shaking of all canoeists who get dunked.

The youngsters, who worked at a small brewery, took pity on two 60-something, sopping wet mariners and offered us a snort from their bottle of rum. At 10 a.m., after a cold dunking, I am here to tell you it went down easy. And there is hope for the youth of the Czech Republic.

Back in the game, we briefly paddled together. In thanks, I offered my American ball cap in trade with Veronika for her employer’s brewery hat, and she happily accepted. Miles later, we saw them off and on again with a second canoe in company, and they had passed the cap around to the young men and women in the other boat, taking turns with it. That made me happy.

Dik and I handled the river that day and the next as we got used to working together, me shouting half the instructions in English and he responding in Czech. As it turns out, when you are in the middle of rapids, you revert to your primary language. And we each learned a new set of profanities in the other’s patois.

The next weirs were no problem; I portaged the final one to get videos of the other fellows paddling through. Low water caused us to ground often, and we (usually Dik) had to drag our way over many gravel spots. If that canoe had any paint on it when we started, it did not when we finished.

Most of the two-day, 18-mile river route was slow and easy. Four or five fishermen watched us warily as we floated past. None reported any fish. Mallards and white swans were the most populous waterfowl, and a lone kestrel followed us overhead. A few cottage owners waved ahoj as we passed, happy to see canoes again in another spring. A large dam needed portaging.

We docked downstream from the community of Loket to beat a hailstorm; we waited it out under a nearby tin roof, the stones sounding like a snare drum on the rusty metal.

Happy, wet, a bit sore, but satisfied, we called an end to our journey. As the Czechs say, výborný. Excellent.

-30-

Last in a series.

The authorities released a yellow sky warning for us early in our hike; the yellow – no smoking or open flames in the zone -- put us on notice that forest fires were a possibility. The danger spread from Austria and Hungary through parts of Germany and the Czech Republic all the way into Poland. Low snow depths and no rainfall – the corn looked awful to a guy from Iowa – had caught up to us.

But after a night of light showers, the dry weather was not our major concern. Insects were. “In the Czech Republic,” Libor said, “the number one predator is the tick.”

We hiked along long fields of barley, rapeseed and meadow grasses, a region known as a hot spot for ticks and a danger from those critters carrying Lyme disease and encephalitis. (Lyme disease may cause encephalitis.) Almost all Czech hikers or campers of any experience have been vaccinated for tick-borne encephalitis (TBE), a potentially fatal swelling of the brain that you do not want.

And it was by mere chance that I was vaccinated, too. For many years, my wife and I have hosted Czech students at our home in Minnesota. This year, Ester and Pavel were our guests. In another coincidence which marked this adventure, Ester’s family has a cabin near the region where I was to hike. Almost in passing, she mentioned ticks. “How bad are they?” I asked.

“Really bad. I had 14 on me once last year,” she said. That about put us off our brunch.

Then she added, “Are you vaccinated?”

‘Um, no. I don’t think so.”

“Do it.”

I did. Two shots at the travel clinic, two weeks apart, and a third and final dose after I get back. At about $400 per jab, none are covered by insurance, but they are cheaper than getting encephalitis. There is no vaccine for Lyme disease, although one is in the works..

I used permethrin spray on the top layer of my camping clothing and a strong bug dope that I had bought for an Amazon trip on my skin. And when I pulled out my BWCA-regulation bug net, my colleagues almost doubled over with laughter. They had never seen one in action. I need to get the Czech distribution rights.

There are more than 900 species of ticks in the world, including two to be nervous about in the Czech Republic: the castor bean tick and the ornate dog tick. Ten percent of the castor bean ticks carry Lyme disease. I don’t want to see any tick, bean nor dog. As Pliny the Elder, the Roman encyclopedist, said of ticks, “the foulest and nastiest creatures that be.”

Dik and Petr have suffered from Lyme disease, bitten in past years on a similar hike. In Dik, the bite appeared as a red bull’s-eye on his thigh. He got lucky, he said, to have no more symptoms than an intense itch.

Petr was not so lucky. He missed multiple weeks of work with headaches, fever and general weakness. It took a year to fully recover, he said, and even today he blames migraine headaches on the disease.

You must contact a tick to have it bite you; they don’t jump or fly. They love the long grasses and meadows where we walked and slept, and in some cases, the trail was so narrow that it was impossible not to brush up against the foliage. A daily tick check was part of our routine.

We got lucky. I did not find a tick on me over the entire trip, while the others picked off only one or two, and none had attached themselves. The only aggressive wildlife I encountered was a handful of stinging nettles that I grabbed as I lost my balance on the bank of a muddy creek.

As it turned out, the yellow sky warning worked in our favor. The dry spring had knocked down the tick population; the insects are very vulnerable to dehydration and can die within 48 hours in a drought. High temperatures made it worse for them, but better for us.

The Czech Hydrometeorological Institute, ever helpful in weather prediction, takes ticks seriously enough to provide biweekly “tick activity forecasts” for campers and hikers. Our region was “moderate” and its advice, translated into English, was “do not sit or lie down in vegetation.”

Not a problem. We looked for rocks as chairs.

Fifth in a series. For the first four episodes, check here, here, here and here.

Every step in a European hike brings the potential for historical reflection. Civilization and all its discontents have been here for a very long time. Our stop at Újezd was such a case.

Or what was left of it: a large cross, a war memorial, four benches, and graves somewhere in the Czech soil.

There are conflicting stories as to what happened to the village of Újezd and its 175 people during and after the two big 20^th-century wars. As best as I can learn, and I am no war historian, this is what happened.

Originally, the village was known as Mähring, reflecting the German heritage of many of its inhabitants. Local legend has it that the forest was flush with deer; the last bear seen in the country, in 1800, lived nearby. The official founding of the village dates only to 1904, when the municipality was recognized by the ruling Austro-Hungarians.

Újezd is a common toponym in the Czech Republic; the word derives from an Old Church Slavonic term meaning, in this case, “area enclosed by a fence or a border.” And indeed, this community existed beginning in the 1200s on a far western border. Located in Sudetenland, the village was three and a half miles southeast of Rehau, Germany. And that’s the source of many of its problems.

After the First World War, the collapse of the Austrian empire turned the community over to the new Czechoslovak state. Many citizens had fallen; nearly hidden in the valley of the nearby Újezdský stream was a monument to their sacrifices. But war was not done with its people.

The name Újezd was added in 1924 after the creation of the new country. The name was to last, but not the rulers. After the 1938 Munich Agreement, in which three million Czechs – most of German heritage – were handed over to the Nazis without any significant participation from the Czech government, Újezd was annexed by Nazi Germany. The church, 40 houses, and their inhabitants were now German. And war was here. As we trudged through the countryside, the remnants of several pillboxes still stood in the fields where Nazis and Czech resistance fighters battled.

The Americans were in Rehau by the spring of 1945. In April, the U.S. Third Army, 90^th Infantry Division, using grenades and tanks, attacked the Germans in Újezd. It became the first Allied force to set foot on Czech soil.

After World War II, Allen Welsh Dulles, the U.S. Office of Secret Service station chief in Berlin, tried but failed to give the Újezd peninsula to Germany. The community was again returned to Czechoslovakia, but not everyone was included. In 1946, the farmers of German heritage in Újezd and their families were kicked out of their homes and forcibly removed to East Germany, some with ancestors having lived and worked in the area for centuries, as part of the post-war expulsion of Germans in the Sudetenland. They were only allowed to take 50 kilograms of belongings with them (about 110 pounds), and the last families of Újezd left in August 1946. The looting of their homes and farms in Újezd began.

Soon, the Soviets rolled in. The USSR elite and its Czech puppets did not completely trust the East Germans (nor each other) and created a border zone. Any remaining citizens who were Czechs, then Germans, then Czechs, and now Soviets – all in 10 years – were forced to move. Everyone.

By 1950, the village was abandoned. By 1953, there was hardly a stick left of it – the structures were blown up and bulldozed except for a border guard outpost. The Czech communists now had a DMZ where people lived and farmed. Today, nearby is the Peklo or Pekelný Les, translated in English as the Hell Forest, and we know why.

Now Újezd is known as a zaniklá vesnice, “a vanished village” in an English translation, which seems both right and wrong. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, attempts were made at memory-making here. The war memorial, smashed during the looting, was discovered in 1990 and rebuilt. The names of those from Újezd who fell during the Second World War were added. The cemetery was restored, and the cross erected. Benches were added for mourners.

In 2008, a small span, called Evropy Most, (Bridge of Europe), was built on the foundations of the old crossing between Újezd and Rehau. It serves as a model of friendship between the countries. Nearby, a marker signifying the westernmost point in the Czech Republic guards the new bridge.

We paused at the cemetery, took a sip of water, listened to the common chaffinches, a blackcap and a nightingale, and silently filed across the bridge, over the stream, into Germany.

-30-

Fourth in a series. For the first three essays, click here, here and here.

In any squad on a rigorous hiking trail, medical concerns past and present inevitably come up, especially with older guys. Libor was too young to hurt much, but Dik had a balky knee, and Petr was struggling with dietary issues and migraines. In my case, I wanted to let the group know that I still live with the effects of Giardia, picked up three years earlier on a Boundary Waters trip, but mostly under control. Still, I told the group, I may need to swing off the trail at a moment’s notice.

What happened next stopped me in my tracks.

Dik Lambl looked at me. “What did you say?”

I said, “Uh, I have been affected by this parasite that took some of my large intestine away. It’s called Giardia and …”

“I know what it’s called,” Dik said. “My great-great-grandfather’s brother discovered it. His name was Vilém Dušan Lambl. That’s why it’s named Giardia lamblia.”

“Wait a minute. That’s your name, too.” I think the morning slivovitz shot went to my head. Am I hiking with a descendant of the fellow who named my illness?

Yes.

So, as the Czechs often say, there is a story here…

A brief review: Giardiasis is a disease caused by the binucleated flagellated protozoan parasite Giardia lamblia (synonyms: G. intestinalis and G. duodenalis) that inhabits the intestines in humans and other mammals. It’s a big problem in developing countries with poor water supplies. In Minnesota and elsewhere, it is often called “beaver fever” because of the association of contaminated water with the presence of beavers. You swallow a Giardia cyst (usually thousands of them), and they go to work on your innards. The result is a combo platter of abdominal cramps, nausea, acute or chronic diarrhea, malabsorption, weight loss, and the need to be damn close to a toilet when the symptoms are at their height. Specialized antibiotics can kill it—even though it is not a bacterium—if caught in time; symptoms can be controlled with diet and fiber supplements.

Vilém, Dik’s great-great-great-uncle, was the first person to employ a microscope to identify and draw the morphological characteristics of the parasite. In 1859, he used his equipment to examine the stool of a 5-year-old girl. He knew what he was looking for because the famed Dutch microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, in 1681, described the presence of organisms in his own diarrhea, but he did not take the work any further. Perhaps things firmed up. A couple of decades after Lambl, French zoologist Alfred Mathieu Giard outlined the parasite in greater detail.

By all accounts, Lambl, a physician, was not an egotistical fellow and named the little critters Cercomonas intestinalis. But his accuracy in drawing the parasite, when compared with modern photographs, is striking. Clearly, he was a skilled draftsman with interests spanning multiple fields, including tiny fauna.

He was also a pain in the ass (ha!) to the ruling Austrian Empire, as he and two brothers were involved in the Czech patriotic and democratic movements of the mid-century. According to Czech genetic scientist Marie Lipoldova, it nearly ended his career. The Austrian secret police put the squeeze on him, and he left the Empire for Russian-ruled Ukraine and then Poland, where he worked for the last 30 years of his life as a professor and hospital director. When he died, in 1895, he left several thousand Dutch guilders to support Czech medical students in Prague as well as a long trail of important medical research.

In the meantime, in 1888, the French naturalist Raphael Anatole Émile Blanchard renamed the microorganisms Lamblia intestinalis; in 1915, to recognize the work of Alfred Giard, the species was renamed again to Giardia lamblia.

In 1981, the World Health Organization added Giardia to the list of parasitic pathogens; it may be the most common pathogenic parasitic infection in humans worldwide. There is no vaccine.

When you hike for hours, there is a lot of time for conversation, even with a language barrier. Our medical discussions soon turned from Dik’s famous relative to a serious predator that he and Petr grappled with on the trail.

Third in a series.

The first two installments of Adventures in Bohemia are here and here.

-30-

The first day’s hike covered a hilly nine miles after a two-hour drive from Prague. Our destination was a farmer’s private camp – a term used to describe a variety of locations and amenities where a tent could be pitched. In this case, Petr, our navigator, found the camp north of the village of Krásná in western Bohemia; it was about a half-dozen acres of flat meadow with the grasses mowed short and a paper sign that read Stanování Povoleno (camping allowed). A pit toilet was set up at one corner, and a small cabin with an eave over a table guarded another corner. There was a fire ring between them, with a couple of logs for benches, and a stack of firewood.

We had not seen another human on our hike that day, and the Czechs were convinced that the cabin would be empty, occupancy depending on a first-come basis and our travels coming early in the season.

To our surprise, five hikers had beaten us to the building and taken up all but one wooden bunk; Libor and I pitched tents, while Petr and Dik unrolled sleeping bags on the cold hard ground. An hour of daylight remained as we each prepared our suppers.

Supper – all meals, actually – highlights a difference between the style of camping the Czechs prefer versus what I was used to in canoe country in North America. In my experience, almost all the camp food is shared. One unlucky soul is assigned to carry the food pack, which is always the heaviest. My Czech friends, on the other hand, each carry their own food and gear, including camp stoves and fuel, utensils, pots, seasonings and anything else they might need. This led to four guys cooking four meals at each stop. About the only thing we shared was a shot of Czech plum brandy (slivovitz) to start each day. It’s an eye-opener at 6 a.m.

The cabin, outhouse and meadow were free of charge. In addition, the farmer had stacked plastic bottles of water, asking for a few Czech crowns per bottle. It was all on the honor system. At the farm, a cistern fed a livestock pond; Libor guessed the water was drinkable as he brushed his teeth in it. I needed more than a guess—more on parasites later—so I passed and used bottled water.

In my amateur analysis of the circumstances, I asked Libor if the what’s-mine-is-mine camping culture was somehow a reaction against the old Soviet system, which the country endured for a half-century, and community property was the official position of the regime. After the fall of the Soviets, citizens could have their own stuff. Libor granted that this was a possible explanation, but he warned against too much psychological analysis without several Czech beers to clear the mind.

The Soviet era was mentioned at the camp; however, when we discovered that one of the other crew members was Marketa Světlíková, a daughter of Václav Trojan, one of the heroes of the 1989 Velvet Revolution. Her father, a friend in the circle around the dissident playwright and future Czech president Václav Havel, was one of the first 10 signers of Charter 77, perhaps the most significant human rights manifesto in the country’s long struggle for freedom.

Trojan is the son of the famous Czech composer of the same name. The younger man grew up with an intense creativity and turned it to the study of science at Charles University, but he was expelled as a troublemaker after two years, finding work as a lighting technician in a theater and then avoiding military service by toiling in a coal mine before he gave up and joined the army. Upon discharge, he returned to the university for Prague Spring, the brief loosening of Soviet restrictions soon crushed by tanks and bullets, which had begun in 1968. Brilliant in the mathematical arts, he won a scholarship to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and headed overseas. He made it as far as Heathrow Airport in London. There, he tore up his ticket and returned to Prague. He realized, he said, that once free of the Soviets, he would never go back. His quote was, “I’m certainly not going to emigrate while they are shooting at people back home.”

Eventually, he found work at the Research Institute for Mathematical Machines, where he fell in with four people who would also be Charter 77 signatories. They became targets of state security -- the regime stripped him of his job title and took away his driver’s license -- but in a reflection of the importance of their work developing early Czech computing systems, most were allowed to keep their jobs after intense interrogations, brief incarcerations, and more threats. Trojan lives in Prague today.

Marketa’s English was excellent, and her stories were fascinating. Another Czech hiker wandered into camp at dusk, but we had few interactions on the trail after that first night. The evening grew colder, and Dik moved his blankets near the fire, while Petr shifted to sleep on the bench at the table as darkness fell.

Second in a series. Read Part 1 here.

-30-

There are four of us hiking in the north Fichtel Mountains in Germany, just across its eastern border with the Czech Republic. The time is late May, and the spring has been very, very dry here, but the woods are a deep green of conifers – well-managed spruce, fir and pine. Our path is a logging trail, littered with slash, lumpy and awkward to walk on while shouldering full packs. At 25 degrees C (77 degrees F), it’s hot in the sun but cool under the tall trees.

My companions are all Czechs. Vladimír (Dik) Lambl, Petr Václavík and Libor Vacek have taken annual hike/canoe trips across the Czech Republic for several years; they have graciously invited me along. The Czechs call it tramping (trampování) and have a long-held passion for backpacking.

Our destination after a couple of days is the Ohře River in Bohemia, the ancestral home of my father’s people. We started the trip in the far western Czech Republic, at the city of Aš, and our route takes us into Germany and back in a 23-mile loop, unless we get lost. A hiking routine is familiar to the three Czechs, although this route is new, and for me, it ticks off a goal on my life list of canoeing adventures.

The Czechs, although landlocked, love their water sports almost as much as tramping, often rowing and paddling well above their weight in the Summer Olympics, for example. Coincidentally, a canoe World Cup race is being held in Prague while we are on the trail. But we will not race once we reach the Ohře. In the small community of Kynšperk nad Ohře, translated as Königsberg in German (“kings’ mountain”), we will connect with a canoe livery company that will provide us with boats, life jackets, paddles and barrels to keep our gear dry. My canoe, shared with Dik, will need the barrels.

The plan after a strenuous two-day hike is for an easy couple of days downstream on the Ohře, which is the fourth-longest river in the country and considered among the wildest, if not in terms of rapids but certainly in terms of scenery. We cannot take too long on any of the hike/canoe legs because, unlike me, the other fellows are men-at-work and have real jobs to get back to.

Dik is a wiry fellow in his early 60s, although he appears younger. Always smiling, he owns a dry-cleaning and ironing business. Petr, who looks like he played linebacker in the NFL, is in his early 40s and is a transmission mechanic and supervisor for Škoda, the vehicle manufacturer. He owns four motorcycles. Libor, my connection to the squad, is a videographer for CNN-Prague, plays excellent guitar, and is a sprightly, cheerful 38. I’ve got 30 years on him. Libor’s English is good; Dik’s is OK and Petr is working on it, much like me and my Czech.

Libor and I met in Minnesota when he and a CNN-Prague reporter were in the United States covering the 2024 election. We discovered a shared interest in canoeing; upon parting, he said: “We’ll have to paddle together in the Czech Republic.” Sure, I said, thinking this was in the manner of most Minnesota invitations, sincerely given but never realized.

Two months later, he texted me with the dates of the trip. “Are you in?”

“I’m in.”

Except I wasn’t. Six days before we were scheduled to leave, my father died. It wasn’t entirely unexpected, as he was 94, but he would have enjoyed the story of my trip through his family’s long-ago homeland, including their old village of Bechyné.

A year passed. My wife and I bought tickets for a 17-day vacation to Prague to see old friends; Libor texted a couple of weeks later with his group’s 2026 adventure dates. Remarkably, those days were within our trip. “Are you in?” he said.

“I’m in.”

First of a series.

The journalist Nicholas von Hoffman, relating his experiences visiting American Samoa with the cartoonist Garry Trudeau after Trudeau, without ever seeing the island, published a storyline on the adventures of Uncle Duke as governor of the territory:

“He’d drawn and written extensively about American Samoa, so now it was time to do some research on the subject. Today’s responsible journalism demands that you have your facts right, if not before you go into print, at least afterwards.”

That was the situation here at Just a Bit Outside in the Czech Republic recently. Having written about the most famous tree in the county, the ancient linden in Kamenice nad Lipou, it was time to see the tree itself. (In my defense, it is hard to get to Kamenice – it’s not like driving to Chaska.) Our good friends Petr, his wife Šárka and Petr’s father Josef guided us to the town on a sunny Sunday. All grew up in the region, and more importantly, are fluent in the language and lore. And Czech traditions. So, as in all visits to Czech villages, the first stop must be to the local pub, where we enjoyed a few beers and nearly forgot our duty to the tree.

Petr recalled us to our mission, however, and to the tree we went. This is not the singing linden – that tree is a few kilometers down the road. A brief review: The town of Kamenice nad Lipou (roughly = stone manor house above the linden) and its 3,700 inhabitants are organized around a beautiful castle/chateau, in which there is an expansive green space where a linden, according to town legend, started to grow in 1248 and stands to this day. (The tree is 20 years older than the town.) Descendants of the tree flourish in the gardens nearby.

A couple of small, tasteful signs (capitalism still making its way to Kamenice -- no entrance fee, no security, no food trucks, no plush toys, no swag of any kind) led to the garden, where the linden was cordoned off with looped theater ropes and stands. The rope border was added two years ago when visitors became a little too aggressive at the tree, although it is still possible to touch a leaf.

The tree, in the first 500 years of life, grew to 20 meters (65 feet) tall. But a lightning strike in 1824 blew apart the top, flattening it considerably.

And flat it now is.

To say it is growing in a wild number of (mostly horizontal) directions is not sufficient. It is as jumbled and twisted as an overturned plate of spaghetti, with a series of sawhorses, jacks, plumbing pipes, brackets, plates, straps, cables, baling wire, chewing gum, and whatever else the gardeners could support it with. The trunk measures 570 centimeters (19 feet) in circumference, and after the lightning haircut, its height is considered 6 meters (20 feet). Moss envelopes many branches, but not heavily on the trunk, and burls bump out of the tree. One of the local stories is that village dances happened under the tree while the band played perched in the canopy above, which took a certain dexterity, no doubt. For the musicians, if not the dancers.

Families with small children, old men with canes, and old women with friends sat on benches, while some tourists circled the old tree in the bright sunshine; it was notable that few people talked and none loudly, perhaps out of respect for what they were looking at, as if they were in a church.

And the tree is a shrine of sorts. If you think about what was happening in the mid-13^th century when the tree began life – holy crusades, castles and cathedrals planned and sieged, villages razed, peasants crushed, serfs oppressed, the Black Death around the corner, etc. – and what else has happened since, it quiets the mind.

Speaking of minds, tea made from a linden is a traditional herbal medicine here. Among other benefits, it “helps psychologically,” as Petr put it. We were a bit too early in the season for fresh summer blossoms, from which tea is made, but Petr and Šárka had a few leaves left over from last year’s crop to serve us upon our return to Prague to conclude the linden experience.

A long visit to an old tree, after a pub stop, and a sip of herbal tea cannot help but ease the mind.

-30-

A person can learn a lot from close, quiet observations of nature. No one has been better at it than Gilbert White, the English parson who wrote Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne in the late 18^th century. He’s an inspiration for those of us here at Just a Bit Outside. We will return to Parson White in detail in a few weeks.

As stressed by the parson, there is much to be said about paying attention to the small things in nature when they appear in front of you. You could learn something. On the other hand, you might, just for the hell of it, spend several minutes watching a bumble bee clinging to a window screen while you wash breakfast dishes.

This bumble bee was performing its morning ablutions. And it was the most thorough cleaning of a bee that I have ever seen, although my sample size now sits at… one. The little black-and-yellow fellow (or female, more on this later) spent those minutes smoothing and combing himself, from top to bottom and front to back. At one point, it held on to the screen by front antennae and groomed with legs, one or two at a time, preening away.

Bees have a special cleansing attachment on a front antenna to help with their combing. They are ridding themselves of the usual dust and dirt, as well as small irritating parasites. And it looked like this bee rubbed its compound eyes with a leg. Perhaps its mother didn’t lecture him about that habit.

I say “him” although I am not trained in melittology – granted, I get stung about once a year -- so I was not able to determine its gender. A keen-eyed bee observer would have known that male bumble bees have hairy back legs, while females do not. Males have long, curved antennae, while females’ antennae are shorter and jointed. This fellow’s antennae looked long and curved to me. Females have six abdominal segments and males have seven. I should have counted them.

The time was 6:30 a.m., and the wind was picking up. But the little half-inch bee held on, its body rocking back and forth in the freshening breeze while it determinedly finished prepping for the day. Bee experts tell us that females do the work around the hive, and the males, while pollen collectors, are mostly good for reproduction. And they die within weeks of mating. Perhaps that explains the detailed grooming. When you only have one shot, you'd better look your best if you are a male bumble bee.

Parson White, in 1797, correctly observed that bees have no ears. He wrote, “it does not appear from experiment that bees are in any way capable of being affected by sounds.” He shouted at them through a speaking trumpet placed next to a hive “with such an exertion of voice as would have hailed a ship at the distance of a mile,” to no response. In this way, he disagrees with the Roman encyclopedist Pliny the Elder, who wrote in 77 AD that the “clapping of the hands and the tinkling of brass afford bees great delight.” I did not have a speaking trumpet at hand, nor bells, and my hands were in the dish water, so I didn’t repeat these experiments.

When my little friend had finished, he dropped a solid inch-long light brown poop down the window screen. Feeling much, much better, I presume, he flew off.

-30-

I do not have the sharp-eyed vision to spot an arrowhead or ancient button or the head of an axe on a Boundary Waters portage or campsite. Animal bones, and I assume most, if not all of them, are of recent expiration dates, are usually what I stumble upon. An atlas vertebra from a moose was a highlight, as were various shed antlers from the big fellas. But that’s about it.

Recently, I picked up a piece of flint from a river in central Minnesota that looked as if it had been chiseled to fit an ancient hand. Professional diggers would call this lithic debris. But its shape could have been shaped by the forces of nature. However, the stone caused me to ask: What is the proper procedure if a canoe camper in a federal wilderness area discovers an artifact?

Lee Johnson, an archeologist with the U.S. Forest Service in Duluth, supplied me with a helpful answer. The short answer is “leave it be.”

The alert camper is advised to take a photograph of the artifact in situ or mark it on the GPS, then notify the local district ranger. The ranger will contact an archaeologist to take it from there.

Johnson has more experience than most. His work on the portage to and from Rat Lake, which connects at the east end of Rose Lake on the Voyageurs Highway, was published in 2024 by The Minnesota Archeologist. The Rat Portage, or Portage la Marte [martin] to the voyageur, is what’s known as a short-haul portage. On today’s maps, it is only between four and eight rods long. As such, the path can be considered a “lift-over” portage, by which a canoe can be carried by one person at each end, rather than flipped to a single set of shoulders under a yoke. The route was heavily used by the original inhabitants and further trodden by the voyageurs on a main route from Rainy Lake to the trading post at Grand Portage on Lake Superior.

With this much historical traffic – sometimes small settlements were established near the important portages – comes the opportunity to find what those past travelers left behind. Johnson and his predecessors turned up a variety of objects on Rat Portage, including a pipe stem, a pipe bowl fragment, a lithic (stone) drill, buttons, a musket ball, a shoe buckle, hand-made nails, a plated spoon, and a piece of an old kettle, among other things. A setting pole shoe, which fits on the bottom of a long rod (called a perche by the French) used to shove a canoe through shallow water, was also found. All this on a portage barely 70 feet long.

The use of metal detectors by professional archaeologists, once considered a breach of professional ethics, today helps with the discovery of some of these items. More modern debris (foil, wire) also turns up, of course. But there is no substitute for a small shovel and dirty knees.

Johnson and his colleagues surmised that Rat Portage was a way station – a place to take a load off (literally), sit, have a smoke, and cook a meal. Underscoring their importance as an historic transportation route, four major portages, including the seven-mile Grand Portage out of the community of the same name, are listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Next time you are sitting on a designated site on a windy point, recall that there is a high likelihood that a camp has existed there for more than 2,000 years. The Woodlands people of the year 1000 AD wanted to keep the mosquitoes away just as much as we do. As did the Ojibwe, the Cree, the Dakota, the voyageurs, and British soldiers. But, even with all that human activity throughout the BWCA, I have never discovered so much as an iron nail. Wrigley Spearmint Gum wrappers, yes. Canadian Mountie brass buttons, no.

Johnson stressed the importance of protecting and stewarding cultural resources on public land. “Many artifacts from the Boundary Waters and other public lands have been looted, collected without a permit, or have otherwise walked away with visitors,” he said. “These items are irreplaceable pieces of our shared heritage, and important that they be left in place.”

To quote Winston Churchill, who I doubt was ever in a canoe but was wise nonetheless: "The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see."

-30-

Smallmouth bass are the most popular sport fish in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, possibly trailing only the walleye in time, money and legend among today’s anglers. But this wasn’t always the case. As often happens in history, the rise in popularity of smallmouth bass reflects a combination of intentional efforts by both professional and amateur (“bucket”) biologists, as well as the compromises and regulatory quirks shaped by political considerations.

Our story begins at the start of the 20^th century, when sport fishing and hunting developed into a leading attraction for visitors to canoe country, many of whom were enjoying more leisure time with the creation of a large middle class and increased transportation options (roads, cars, fly-in resorts, outboard motors) to get them to lakes in northern Minnesota and southern Canada. Outdoor magazines such as Field & Stream, sensing a demand among their audiences, began to employ freelance writers who wove tales of giant fish in undiscovered waters available to those who wished to throw out a line. These monsters were typically northern pike, with walleye, lake trout and sturgeon running in the top tier. A 45-pound Minnesota record pike caught in Basswood Lake in 1929 added to the excitement.

There were no tall tales about catching the world’s largest smallmouth bass in canoe country for the straightforward reason that there were no smallmouth bass in canoe country. They are not native to the region. The waterfalls from the rivers that flowed into Lake Superior stopped them. That was about to change in the late 1930s.

Local civic boosters from communities like Ely, resort owners, outfitters, guides, freelance writers and ordinary anglers – with the help of professional scientists – wanted to increase the scope of fishing options for a growing number of visitors. Walleye, lake trout and especially sturgeon, as turned out, are quite difficult to catch for the novice and experienced angler alike, and the city-bred client who read lengthy, breathless accounts of stringers of giant fish (and saw photographs of massive catches piled strategically in front of outfitters’ signs – some things never change) wanted in on the action.

An answer was available in the smallmouth bass. There is some evidence that white settlers hauled smallmouth from the Mississippi River system into the nearby Lake of the Woods around 1900, and the Ontario Provincial government sanctioned the practice in 1901. But the stocking effort in what was to become the Boundary Waters didn’t take off until almost 40 years later. (What we think of as the Boundary Waters was less visited than the Rainy Lake region in the early 20^th century.)

Among those who participated in the stocking – at the urging of the president of the fishing-focused Isaak Walton League – was the Ely author and activist Sigurd Olson, who had a graduate degree in animal ecology, taught biology at the community college but also owned an outfitting business that catered to fishermen. “If they take here the way they took in the Lake of the Woods country, we will really have something to be proud of,” Olson wrote of the bass. He brought the first smallmouth shipments to Basswood and Knife lakes in 1940.

Most of the stocked fish came from the Mississippi watershed, and soon boosters and resort owners were all in on the introduction of the new species. The fish are hardy enough to survive transport, rookie anglers can catch them in the heat of the summer, and as it turns out, they spread like soft butter on hot toast. The rocky, clear waters of the Canadian Shield lakes were a perfect habitat.

As with the introduction of any non-native species into a new ecosystem, there are winners and losers. The losers in the case of the smallmouth stocking were the mature lake trout and northern pike that lived in smaller lakes. Smallmouth predation probably hurt trout and pike fry, but an important culprit was the additional fishing pressure in the small lakes that grew those native species to larger sizes. With the additional publicity, more anglers appeared, and more kept and killed larger pike and trout, even while fishing for smallmouth. In the meantime, walleye populations dropped for two decades into the 1970s, but cooler summer temperatures seem to be as responsible as bass predation for the decline of walleye young. Miron Heinselman, the biologist who authored the definitive book on the BWCA ecosystem, wrote: “The final outcome of recent introductions is unknown.” The answers are not always easy.

Jump ahead to 1993. A new management plan from the U.S. Forest Service regulated everything from visitor quotas to acceptable transportation systems, including a rule that only native fish can be stocked in BWCA waters. That might have put the kibosh on smallmouth stocking, but for a loophole bigger than a torn gill net. The plan allowed that non-native fish (smallmouth and some trout) could be restocked if they were previously stocked before 1964. That was the year that the federal government established the Wilderness Act, the forerunner to the BWCA, which contained the usual number of compromises to get it passed and was as good an arbitrary historical marker as any. The 1993 stocking update, with its 1964 exception, became known as the smallmouth bass provision among forest service employees.

To be fair to Olson and others who scooped smallies into BWCA waters in the 1940s, they may have justified it by knowing that the bass, while introduced to the Arrowhead region, were common across the rest of Minnesota. And perhaps some had second thoughts. In 1952, Olson supported a law banning live minnows from being carried into Canada as “undesirable fish” and a “biological hazard.” But he was silent on the smallmouth bass stocking for the rest of his career.

In the end, the Boundary Waters wilderness ecosystem of 2026 is not the ecosystem of 1901, but no ecosystem is.

-30-

Recently, I mentioned my experience as a summer ranger at a state park, which is a job title more significant than it sounds, especially when cleaning 17 outhouses first thing in the morning. Living the dream, I was not.

At the other end of the day, and the opposite end of the job’s enjoyment, were the nighttime patrols through the campgrounds, beach and boat ramps in a blue Dodge pickup. The park was generally quiet, and the campers were well-behaved, which led to a lot of free time.

My favorite break was to watch the bats. There was a big yellow yard light at a public beach, and it drew insects and the bats. Using their echolocation skills, bats fed on the bugs that were attracted to the light, swooping and swishing through the air at dizzying speeds, grabbing whatever unfortunate moth happened to be cozying up to the illumination. I would sit on the truck’s tailgate and watch until I felt guilty about not “working” and return in an hour or so after making another round. As far as I know, the feeding went on all night.

The park was in Iowa, which has nine native species of bats; I could not tell you which were feasting, and perhaps it was more than one type, although they looked about the same size. All nine species are aerial insectivores, so that didn’t help with any identification.

The largest Iowa native is the hoary bat, with a 16-inch wingspan (as big as a robin); the smallest is the tricolored bat, which stretches to 7 inches. Although they were hard to appreciate in real time, bats often perform tricky aerial maneuvers while feeding, including flipping upside down while catching their prey with their feet. Or is this just showing off for other bats? Bats have clawed thumbs, which makes it easier to grab a bug and hang on.

They also supped while flying, but they are messy eaters; I would find small bits of moth wings and thoraxes on the ground under the light. Even the tricolor, the smallest bat, can eat 1,200 insects in a night.

Not everyone likes bats, for reasons valid and less so. Bats are a leading cause of death via rabies, but the fatality number is 7 to 10 people per year across the entire United States. Fewer than 1 percent of the animals carry the virus.

In popular culture – Batman aside – excellent films such as 1930s The Bat Whispers, in which the master criminal wears a black mask and a cape and flings his arms to look like wings, added to the cultural unease about the animal. And I haven’t even mentioned vampire bats, which, to be fair, do drink the blood of other animals (hematophagy), but the nearest one in the wild is in Central America. Then, of course, there is the usage of bats as epithets and putdowns: batsh*t crazy, blind as a bat, bats in the belfry, old bat, bat out of hell. Those phrases didn’t help the bats’ PR efforts.

Two of the native species, the Northern long-eared bat and the little brown bat, are at risk because of the well-documented white-nose syndrome. It’s a fungus that grows in places such as warm, moist caves where these bats hibernate; the big brown bat, by contrast, can tolerate freezing temperatures where the fungus does not grow and is less affected by the syndrome. Northern long-eared bats are a federally threatened species, and the Indiana bat, another Iowa native, is worse off and considered endangered. As an endangered species, the law protects the Indiana bat even if it is living in your chimney. So avoid swatting it with your tennis racket.

Years ago, we put up a bat house on a shagbark hickory tree on the property, but it did not suit the neighborhood bats and remains unoccupied. We couldn’t pay a bat to stay there. It’s possible that predators – owls, raccoons, hawks -- could get to the box and the smart bats avoided it. Large trees with loose bark, like the hickory, are supposed to be suitable homes, but you know the old real estate truism: location, location, location. Or should it be echolocation?

-30-

I went on a couple of mushroom hunts in Iowa a week or so ago; the first outing was not fruitful, as the weather had been dry and cool. That night it rained; the sun came out, and so did the mushrooms.

Most mushroom hunters, in the spring, prefer morel mushrooms, and with good reason. They are relatively easy to identify, for one, and second, they are delicious. Yes, there is a species called a false morel that can make you sick, but it is easy to identify if you’ve got some experience picking the true morels.

My hunt was for Dryad’s Saddle mushrooms, also known as pheasant’s back (sometimes spelled pheasant back without the possessive), which is what I learned to call them. Cerioporus squamosus is its Latin name. They often appear earlier than morels and are simple to identify because they look like the tail of a pheasant, of course. I found a few, low to the ground on dead trees in moist conditions, where they grew last year, and I was carrying them home when I ran into another person out on the trail. As I got into hailing distance, he spotted my bag and recognized that we were both on the lookout for fungi.

There is no avoiding another mushroom hunter. I showed him my morning’s efforts – if you have been mushrooming, you know the culture, and you must reveal your work to a fellow traveler – and he was surprised. He was expecting a bag of morels (he had none of any type). I explained what they were and broke off a bit for him to sniff. Cucumber, I said, and he agreed.

I am no mushroom expert; I know five or six types and stick to those. Recall what the Czech grandmas used to say: Všechny houby jsou jedlé, některé jen jednou. This translates into: All mushrooms are edible, some only once. Sound advice, as one would expect from a Czech grandma.

I am no chef, but mushrooms are easy to prepare. Pheasant back mushrooms can be sliced thin and fried quickly in a hot oil with a little salt and pepper. Garlic, onions and white wine are not bad options. The big ones can be tough, so let them be. Another method is to dry them, grind them into a powder, and use them as a flavoring.

A dryad, in Greek mythology, is a sprite or wood spirit; the term dryad was popularized by poets such as Milton as a synonym for tree nymph. The shape of the mature mushroom looks like a chair that a tired wood nymph could rest on, and thus a common name was born. In another use, I have read that it can be processed into a type of paper pulp.

And here is an obligatory warning note: Never eat any mushroom unless you are certain it is safe. Ask for expert help. Always cook it thoroughly. And when in doubt, remember what the Czech grandmas said.

-30-

Bar trivia question: What plant is nicknamed “the outhouse flower?”

a) A rose, “by any other word would smell as sweet.” – Shakespeare

b) A corpse flower, “by any other word smells like rotten meat.” – Not Shakespeare

c) A skunk cabbage, “by any other word smells like a skunk.” – Could have been Shakespeare if he’d thought of it.

d) A hollyhock, “by golly has no smell.” – Anon.

The correct answer is d) hollyhock.

And they have no aroma. One might assume any flower placed by a privy would be left there to counter the scent of the scene. But hollyhocks were planted in Victorian England, the American Midwest and the West, not to hide the smell, but to hide the outhouse. And to draw attention to it! How does that work?

A biennial, hollyhock grows six to 12 feet high, with huge flowers, and it has a heartiness that survives a tough winter and dodgy soil conditions. Because they grow so tall, it helps them to have support to prevent wind damage, so a latrine serves that purpose.

The blooms, which appear in year two, are available in pink, white, yellow, purple, and maroon and give the viewer a distraction from the intention of the structure, while also marking its territory, so to speak. Perhaps not obvious to a 21^st-century citizen, the hollyhocks planted around an outhouse served as signage, as in “hey, ye olde john is right here.” Proper and sensitive Victorian visitors, too refined to ask “hey, where’s your crapper?”, were then spared the embarrassment of the Earl of Gnarlybum pointing to the loo.

In the interest of deep-dive research that we are known for here at Just a Bit Outdoors, I checked with my in-laws, who retain an outhouse at the acreage left from their family farm after the freeway went through and took out all the other buildings. No hollyhocks were planted near it, they said, but the flowers were placed to hide a giant propane tank on another farm. In 1960, you did not want it obvious to the neighbors that your place was not 100 percent electricity-powered. Plus, giant propane tanks are ugly.

I spent time as a summer park ranger, which is a fancy name for Chief Outhouse Swabber, and the park bosses were not keen on the idea of my planting flowers during work hours. “Vault toilets,” they were called, in reference to the idea that they were sealed; a pit toilet, which is excavated, lets the liquid seep into the ground. Pro tip: Vault toilets smell way worse than pit toilets.

Hollyhocks had other uses. In ancient Egypt, a hollyhock was often buried with a mummy; its pollen has been found in Neanderthal remains. Both suggest its use in funerary rites. They reseed abundantly, so perhaps a rebirth or new growth symbolism was at work. The plant originated in Southwest and Central Asia, and according to legend, it was rubbed on horses’ hooves to relieve pain. The crusaders brought them back to England with their horses; it was discovered that the blooms are edible, though bland, and the young leaves make a passable salad if you don’t think about where they grew.

For the record, there is no relationship between hollyhocks and the quarter moon often cut into an outhouse door. That moon is more the product of cartoonists and other purveyors of popular culture, although it will let in some light and air and serve as a door handle at the long-drop shop.

Today, privy flower enthusiasts can buy the seeds for a variety called “outhouse hollyhocks.” That branding might compromise the plant's edibility, but we lack market research to confirm.

-30-

Many of us look forward to the appearance of spring flowers, signifying that we’ve a) made it through another winter and b) didn’t get nearly as much done indoors in the last four months as planned. That drywall is not going to patch itself.

The first flower I see these days is not a marsh marigold, or even a skunk cabbage, two signs of warmer weather. Rather, it’s the Siberian squill. Small, beautiful, bell-shaped, deep blue flowers that are just about impossible to get rid of; they can dominate a yard. They grow from bulbs and come back every year, as reliable as a Siberian Swiss watch. Siberian squill, as you might guess by its name, does not mind the cold and will even pop up through snow. Also, as is apparent from the name, it’s not a native species here at JaBO HQ.

The excellent website Minnesota Wildflowers aptly put it: “This is the classic case of gardening gone awry.” As with many invasives, the original intention for its import was good, but it escaped captivity and now runs rampant throughout the Upper Midwest. Yet it is still sold in some gardening centers.

Sometimes called “the pretty blue mistake,” squill is very, very hard to remove. You can try to pull it out by the roots, but when the roots are broken, they resprout. About the only option is to dig out all the tiny bulbs, which is a job as detailed as fixing a Swiss Siberian watch. The plant goes dormant quickly – first to arrive, first to leave, like grandparents at a party -- so if it bothers you, just wait. And to be fair, many folks enjoy the dark blue carpet of spring blooms, no matter where it came from.

In days gone by, Siberian squill were planted by gardeners to keep deer and rabbits from their plots. Deer and rabbits won’t eat squill – in fact, no animal should eat it, as it is poisonous from root to seed. Dogs and cats are particularly susceptible to its toxins, usually reacting by vomiting or worse. Even voles won’t touch it. One variant, the red squill, was historically used as an ingredient in rat poison, which tells you all you need to know.

The plant is not native to Siberia. It comes from the Caucasus, in places like Turkey, Armenia and southwest Russia. In olden times, various varieties of squill were planted as edge crops – like a fence, they marked the boundaries of fields. Pythagoras took time out from his mathematical endeavors to suggest that the bulbs of sea squill could be hung in homes to ward off lightning strikes and/or evil spirits. I may try that. Celsus, in the first century, took time from his philosophizing to recommend sucking on a boiled squill bulb to ward off flatulence. I won’t try that.

Siberian squill is not a newcomer to these shores, as some sources cite its appearance in North America as early as 1796. A mid-19^th-century how-to book called The Kitchen and Flower Garden said the squill is “one of the prettiest emblems of spring... worthy of all admiration.” But it fell out of favor as horticulturists worried that it crowded out native spring wildflowers with its rapid spread. There are better native options, including hepatica, bluebell, blue phlox and harebell.

There’s a lesson here about unintended consequences. Still, in the grand scheme of things, a yard full of stubborn blue flowers announcing spring could be much worse. Now to the drywall.

-30-

The linden tree in the front yard, between the sidewalk and the street, is dropping dead branches as fast as a bad habit, as it frequently does. I make a little pile of wood for the rabbits to hide from one of the neighbor’s free-range cats.

Another name for this tree is basswood, and the city planners here at Just a Bit Outside headquarters in Minnesota love basswoods on our streets. The foresters say they are “highly adaptable” in urban environments, as they can withstand the pollution, weather shifts and many pests that come their way.

I am told that linden tea is drinkable, in the way that nearly all flowers or buds can be made into a tea, but I have not tried it. Voyageurs, hunters, trappers and other adventurers chewed on the buds as thirst quenchers, as the trees were widespread. Meriwether Lewis, with Lt. Clark, made mention of “copses of linns” in the Missouri River bottoms. Its sap can be boiled into syrup when maples are in short supply.

My tree, now about 35 years old, gives great shade and its blossoms feed the local bees. In fact, Native peoples sometimes called them “bee trees.” My friend Anton Treuer, who teaches Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, notes that the inner bark of linden/basswood can be processed into a tough, stringy fiber (Asigobaan) that is, in his words, “the Ojibwe version of duct tape.” The fiber can be made thin enough to use as a suture to bind wounds. “Bast” is the English name of the inner bark of the tree, and basswood is probably a derivative.

In these troubled times, it seems significant that in German folklore, the linden was known as “The Tree of Justice.” The name stems from the circumstances by which justice was rendered under the tree – the German word is Gerichtslinde (court tree). Folklore tells us that no one can tell a lie beneath a linden tree, as among its strengths is the ability to ward off evil spirits that cause falsehoods. Another version is that the sweet-smelling blossoms held a calming influence on judges, fostering a compassionate verdict or an urge to resolve disputes peacefully among aggrieved parties.

In the Czech Republic, there are tales of famous linden trees that draw the curious. The town of Kamenice nad Lipou Linden is literally named after a tree, which was reportedly planted around 1248. It stands in the town’s castle gardens as a symbol of national resilience and peace. In the village of Telecí, the Singing Lukas Linden is estimated to be 700 years old. The tree itself doesn’t sing – that’s a stretch too far even for Czechs – but it was a big hollow tree and is famous for a legend that told of a local farmer who hid inside to illegally copy a Bible; while working, he sang forbidden psalms to himself, and passersby heard the tree singing.

In my state, we don’t have a justice tree or a singing linden, but the flagship university maintains a major collection of 10 linden species and 22 cultivars at its landscape arboretum, with 46 trees growing there in all.

I keep an eye on the local linden and its habits, picking up its branches and leaving a little shelter for the rabbits. It isn’t a justice tree or a singing tree, and no legends, syrup, tea or duct tape shortages will draw tourists to the edge of my yard. Still, it does its quiet work. The tree is an old neighbor—scarred, imperfect, but steady—giving shade, feeding bees, and dropping what it can no longer hold. Maybe that’s its verdict on how to live: endure, give and let go. In a world that feels increasingly unsteady, that seems like wisdom worth standing under.

-30-