Coincidence

I thought I’d risk being labeled as a crazy new-age twinkie and discuss an alarming and impossible by-product of beaver research. It seems to happen in inexplicable moments and without recognizable patterns but I’ve been noticing it more of late. It is the type of data that most scientists never report because it just makes them appear too bizarre and fanciful. But you, dear readers, already know the worst so we may as well have a candid discussion of the phenomenon.

Coincidence.

Now there are typical everyday coincidences that surprise your life such as running into your principal at the gym or finding out your old boyfriend exactly drives the same make and color of car as you do. And there are rarer personally meaningful coincidences that hum in your awareness like realizing that your locker combination is actually your mom’s date of birth or finding out that you got married in exactly the same town as your best friend from the army got divorced. These things happen. We never expect them, but we are prepared for them. They are like cosmic puns and they usually make an excellent story over a pitcher of margaritas.

But then there are beaver coincidences, random violent streaks of destiny that are so truly alarming that all the hairs on your arms keep standing up even after you’ve had to sit down. I wasn’t planning to mention this at all, bit it seems the time has come. Please be assured that my ridiculous claims are completely true, and that if I had given myself license to fabricate I would have come up with something a little more believable. Our story begins with Longfellow.

Remember a few weeks back when I was talking about how reading Enos Mills pointed me to a section in the poem Hiawatha that I hadn’t paid attention to before? It was the section on Puk-Puk-Keewis who asked to be turned into a beaver so he could hide from Hiawatha in the lodge. When I read it I planned to blog on it the following day, and was excitedly looking about for graphics. It turns out there are sadly no images of turning into a beaver on the internet(s) so I nearly despaired of having the right picture to put with the story.

Then I remembered that in my living room is a very old copy of Volume ! of the Collected Works of Longfellow. I bought it ages ago because it was such a lovely tome (and yes, tome is the right word – huge, heavy, illustrated, leather raised binding ) – that I couldn’t resist. So I thought, gosh maybe there’s a drawing of  puk-puk-keewis in that copy and I can scan it and put it on the website. I used the internet to find exactly where the passage was and marched in to track it down. Mind you, the 500 page book is lying opened on a book stand I picked up at a thrift shop. We don’t really use it but every now and then we turn the pages to keep it from looking too dusty.

What exact page do you suppose that book happened to be open to?

I didn’t dare post about it at the time, as it was too much even for me to explain. We  slunk around the house suspiciously for hours after that, trying to think what well-read visitor to my house might have done it on purpose and struggling not to feel like some tiny cog in massive beaver machinery. In the end I decided to take it as an affirmation that I was doing the right thing, and at the very least the universe didn’t object.

Yesterday I heard from our research buddy Rick Lanman, M.D. whose working on the historic prevalence paper. He had been buried in some dusty volumes researching the fur trade for slivers of information about the west coast when he came across this magazine article from 1840. Guess what he found? Nothing startling about beavers in the sierras but something much more unexpected.

That’s pretty small print. Let me see if I can make it bigger for you.

Look who wrote the article on the history of the fur trade 171 years ago.

What a shock to run across this article written by James H. Lanman in 1840 – wonder if he’s a direct ancestor? This is a real trip. It’s not like our surname is that common! Rick

Ah Rick, I know just how you feel. Every now and then I can almost hear this low groan as the gears shift into place and I realize we are in the grip of something important, something that seems to have a life of its own. Well, in for a penny in for a pound I say. It could be worse. At the moment we’re keen on the flat-tail of some beaver sightings in Port Costa, which could theoretically be our dispersers. I’ll keep you posted. The next coincidence we can only anticipate but certainly not imagine.