1st Grade Field Trip || Monday, May 12, 2008

Today I chaperoned a field trip for Bailey to Cades Cove. Her class was doing one of the Parks as Classrooms programs put on by the Park Service (free of charge) in the CC picnic area. The program focused on major animal groups (mammals, reptiles, amphibians, fish, birds, and invertibrates), as well as requirements for a habitat (food, water, shelter, space, a habitat is a wonderful place--cha cha cha). After the program wound up around 12:30, we decided to go around the loop road. In my many hundreds of trips around the loop road, this was probably one of the best ones. We started with the basic plan of pulling over wherever she wanted to pull over (hence the pictures of horses from the first 25 feet of the loop road... boy did I feel like a tourist pulling over at THE very first pull off... still within view of the entering Cades Cove sign... but hey). Next, we pulled off at the John Oliver cabin trail... It's 1/4 mile to the cabin, and I expected a straight walk there, look around, walk back. Bailey is normally not very adventurous. Well, we walk up there, walk around the cabin, and then she sees some little unmarked side trail and starts pulling me along. Long story short, we spend the next 45 minutes traipsing around the woods searching for cicada molts (we eventually saw 119), cicade holes, trees (she can now ID tulip poplars--her favorite kind of tree... damn, how much do I love that my daughter has a favorite kind of tree at 7 years old??, maples, oaks, magnolias, sycamores, and hemlocks), evidence of boar rooting, turning over rocks for salamanders and bugs, rock hopping in a dried up stream bed, practicing the scientific method, and playing "survival quiz." It was also a spring board for a conversation about the hemlock woolly adelgid and similarities between American and Chinese climates. Yup, I think we went a little over the 1st grade curriculum. Long story short, she's now trying to think of ways to raise money for hemlock saving efforts in the park. Up to 70% of trees in the entire park are hemlocks, and if we continue at the current rate, they will all be dead before Bailey can buy beer, thanks to an exotic species of insect that is just super tiny. Needless to say, I am very proud of her immediate sense of social outrage: "What can we DO about it?" was her very first response, which made me kind of embarrassed that we hadn't done anything about it. Like all environmental movements with the catchphrase "it's a tough job, but we can do it," the adelgids are totally eradicatable (is that a word? I don't know). There is a chemical treatment that can be sprayed at the base of the tree that will be sucked up by the roots and enter the sap and kill the bugs and let the tree live (I've heard the chemical is the flea and tick repellent you put on your dog's back between the shoulder blades... I don't know if this is accurate). This is a good treatment, but due to the number of trees spread over 500,000 acres, it's very impractical. There is also a natural predator of the adelgid from China that feeds exclusively on the adelgids. For all of the Jurassic Park, "Life will find a way" nay-sayers, the cool thing about this predator beetle eats only the adelgid, and if it runs out of the adelgid, it eats other members of its own species. So it wipes out the adelgid and then takes care of itself. The only problem... about $2 per beetle. The NPS is raising money for these options through the sell of bumper stickers and t-shirts, but at the current rate, you may want to start taking lots of pictures of hemlocks. Even the hemlock in our yard is covered with adelgids. Little buggers.

Anyway, I digress. Next, we continued on the loop, stopping at the Methodist Church and one of the Baptist churches. At the Methodist Church, Bailey asked why there were two doors at the front of the church. Response: "One for boys, one for girls. Back then, boys weren't allowed to look at girls' ankles, so they had separate entrances because when girls stepped up their ankles would show under their dress." Bailey response--That's silly. Her act of civil disobedience: refusing to go into the church :) . From there, we walked around the cemetery. My family has a strong background in Myers's and Sparks's, hence William Myers Lombardo, and there are plenty of each in this cemetery. Even though the tombstones are old, it is kind of weird to see a tombstone with the name William Myers on it. I'm not quite brave enough to broach the subject of infant mortality with her, so thankfully she didn't really notice the predominance of infant graves. Nor did we go into much detail regarding the grave of our relative Tom Sparks who was shot and killed at the herders cabin at Spence Field by a mentally retarded (which I mean literally, not in the 7th grade "you're retarded" kind of way) man who was told Tom had a stash of money hidden at the cabin.

At the Baptist church, we practiced scientific method and came up with these hypotheses: 1: Cicadas like the shade; 2: Cicada larvae live in trees; 3: Cicada's exit their molted skin through the thorax. We're not sure how accurate these are... we're going to save them for middle school science projects.

After the Baptist church, we exited the cove via the Rich Mtn Road... winding 11 miles from the Cove to Townsend. Good times, good views, water play, a quick lesson on how to, um, urinate in the woods (FYI: 10 feet off trail, 100 ft from water source, preferably away from trees and vegetation--animals like to lick pee and it can damage trees and veg if too many animals lick it too often... who'd've thought? SO, if you ever see a trail sign with large segments of paint worn off or gnawed away, yup, someone peed on the sign).

All in all, we had a great day.