Saturday, November 13, 2010 - Meramec State Park, Sullivan MO

Suspended Animation, Spider Egg Sac, Red Rock, East Chatham NY, July 20, 2010

Time for a break

Spending so many hours traveling and thinking about traveling gets old after a few days. St Louis and the Mississippi are behind me. This is a nice park. It's quiet here. The sun is shining. The river is running. I think I'll stay an extra night and settle some mud.

Night camp

Site 45C - Meramec State Park, Sullivan MO

The Missouri State Parks website introduces the park with: "The beauty of the Meramec River and its surrounding bluffs, caves and forests have pleased visitors since the park opened in 1927. In 1933, the craftsmen of the Civilian Conservation Corps began blending a variety of visitor facilities into the park's rugged landscape."
Verizon cell phone is weak.
Verizon Broadband service is available here with an amplifier.
Locate Meramec State Park on my Night Camps map
Check the weather here

Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize

The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.

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