You know that dynamic of conversing with someone online and after awhile they say “I’m traveling a bit and will be passing through your town, how about a visit?” Well, that happened. However, the traveling a bit was nearly 14,000 air miles to reach my town, and the passing through was 35,000 feet above my home so the visit required finesse.
But marsanges did it! He flew from his home near Amsterdam Netherlands, to professional meetings in South Korea (5320 miles), then to more meetings in St Louis Missouri (6682 miles), then back west to Sacramento California (1677 miles) for a total (estimated) 13,679 air miles! After all that, of course the local Daily Kos group organized a lunch to greet him. (Thanks to belinda ridgewood for encouragement to follow through on this. Actually, she warned us “navajo will never forgive you if you don’t.”)
During the week after his arrival and before our lunch gathering, marsanges and I visited local hotspots so he could meet thousands of birds, rocks, plants, and stereotypical California attractions (e.g., taco truck meal, wildfire-scorched slope, nearly empty lake). We toured ecosystems I’ve described in stories: Feather River canyon, serpentine habitat, and Butte Creek canyon. DK member and birder extraordinaire chantedor invited us to join her to look for raptors. Thanks to her sharp eyes, we saw six different raptors (including bald eagles) plus 29 other bird species in one morning. Those adventures will be shared with the Daily Bucket nature group this winter when cold and rain keeps us close to home telling stories from sunshine days. We were fortunate to have a sunny warm week for marsanges’ visit in early December.
The visit culminated with a Butte County Kos of CA-01 lunch meeting in Chico on Saturday December 9th. Local members smileycreek, Paradise50, FoundingFatherDAR, Chico David RN, voracious (with her son), and non-DK member Shawn joined us (Besame and marsanges) along with side pocket who drove seven hours round-trip just to join us for lunch.
On Saturday December 9th, we met at
Cafe Petra in
downtown Chico. It was a typical Chico day with brilliant warm sun and bird song. Our cafe was tucked between an anti-war protest that closed the main street one block to the west and the Farmer’s Market that filled the block to the east. Kids sold little bags of Christmas parasites (mistletoe) and vendors offered abundant local fruits, flowers, and veggies. We wandered through the market sampling
cheesecake,
Indian food, and
pomegranates before joining everyone at the cafe.
Our online presence is a slice of who were are, a curated version that might or might not represent our real life selves. How we handle interactions with each other, how we interpret their online self, and how we represent ourselves can nurture — or shatter — opportunities for friendship. Every time I’ve joined Daily Kos members in real life, their best curated online selves are the same people who show up IRL. Conversations flourish. Often we discuss some kind of rabble-rousing. This time it was a protest against CA-01 RWNJ Representative Doug LaMalfa.
The ability to create friendship and community online requires skill and patience (is it an art?). The first time marsanges and I conversed in comments was February 22, 2016 in a story of mine: California’s Climate Change Refugees: Animals Move Upslope Faster Than Plants. And that initial encounter could have gone awry. Rereading it now, I remember that at the time I wondered if this unknown person looked to bully me about what I’d written of someone else’s research. In response to his question, I cautiously referenced back to the research. He responded thoughtfully and wasn’t a bully at all. We slowly felt our way to understanding and appreciating what each other was saying. We found common ground in that first conversation: I’m a botanist fascinated with how vegetation communities are driven by substrate and he is a geologist fascinated by how substrate is revealed in plant composition. For a week in December, we were able to explore in person what we’d talked about online ever since that first encounter.
After the Butte CA-01 lunch, marsanges continued his around-the-world journey, travelling another 6,300 air miles before arriving back home a week later. I’m still waiting to see the photos he took because, as usual, almost all my photos are in my memory and not in my camera. Here’s a photo I took that sums up our online friendship and our week IRL.
The photo shows one of the hotspots with its depths, complexities, expansive sky, and endless horizons. We drove down the mountain, stopping to take in the overview, and then returned through that canyon onto a one lane steep road up the slope. We inspected a creek and its riparian habitat, a four million year old Tuscan mudflow formation, and a blackened area burned during our last wildfire in September. This tour combined what we both appreciate — a varied landscape of geologic strata and the ecosystems that developed on the different substrates. A conversation we’d begun while on two separate continents almost two years ago continued in one place. The opportunity to transfer online friendships to real life is a gift.