Passing through Oxford

I'm finally back in Madrid after more than two months on the road. I spent most of that time in Ethiopia and Somaliland working on a book on the Battle of Adowa. My series of articles about travel in Ethiopia has already started on Gadling and at the end of the month I'll start one on Somaliland.

Before settling back in Madrid the family and I spent ten days in Oxford. Almudena was collaborating with the astronomy department while I did research at the Bodleian library for my book. Julián got to see his English friends and go to camp over the Easter break. We visited the Pitt-Rivers and Natural History museums (his favorites, especially the dinosaurs) and climbed trees but sadly he didn't reacquire the English accent he had last year.

We love Oxford and spent six months here last year. There's always so much going on here and we have a good circle of friends. We had a whirlwind social schedule, including a stroll with friends through Magdalen College gardens to take these photos, and managed to pack in a fair amount of work too, plus a traditional Sunday roast at our local pub. I even managed to go to the Odyssey 2010 f/sf/h convention.

Sadly, our trip was all too short, but we'll be back in the summer for a couple of months. In the meantime I'm planning on hiking in the mountains near Madrid, remembering my Spanish as I forget my Amharic, writing lots, and spending a week in Rome at the national archives.

The Thunderbird photo and False Memory Syndrome

Yesterday I was chatting with a fellow writer about a book she's writing on legendary beasts. One of my favorites is the Thunderbird, a giant dinosaur-like winged creature that haunts the American Southwest, and the conversation turned to the strange role I've played in the story of this mysterious creature.
Let me say at the outset that I don't think the Thunderbird is real. With all the aviation, birdwatchers, and development in the United States in the past century, no giant flying monster could have remained undetected. My skepticism, however, makes this story all the more interesting.

The Thunderbird is part of Native American religious belief, but that creature is like a giant bird with feathers. The more modern Thunderbird is always described as reptilian, which makes some cryptozoologoists (people who study unknown animals) think it's a pterosaur. Supposedly there was an article in the 26 April 1890 edition of the Tombstone, Arizona, Epitaph, about two cowboys shooting a creature with leathery wings like a bat and a head like an alligator. They dragged it back to town and nailed it up to a barn, its wingspan covering the barn's entire length. I haven't seen this article myself, but I know that frontier journalism often played with the truth. Mark Twain got started on fiction while working on his brother's newspaper in the Nevada Territory!

Some photos have turned up over the years. The most famous one shows a giant Thunderbird nailed to a barn with some cowboys standing nearby. I can't show it to you because it doesn't seem to exist, at least not anymore. Many investigators claim to have seen it or even owned a copy, but nobody has one now.

This is where it gets weird. I remember seeing that photo. My memory is of a fairly clear black and white image of a Thunderbird nailed to the roof of a barn, its wingspan almost equal to the barn's length. Men in old western costume are lined up on the roof and in front of the barn. I remember it looked like a rather poor cut-and-paste job. It was common for frontier people to pose next to and on a barn after a barn raising, so perhaps someone added the Thunderbird to a real photo. I even remember where I saw it, in a paranormal magazine at Bookman's, a used bookstore I used to work at in Tucson, Arizona. For some reason I didn't buy the magazine.

This must be a false memory. If the picture existed in a paranormal magazine, it would have been located by dedicated cryptozoologists by now. My experience is just like other people's, in that I have a very clear memory of the event and I no longer have the photo. Some people claim to have seen it in the possession of someone else. Others had a copy and lost it. In my case, I saw it in a magazine I didn't buy. I have unwittingly become part of an urban legend.

Weird, huh? What's going on here? Paranormal investigator Jerome Clark theorizes that the idea of the image is evocative enough to implant a false memory. Perhaps I read about the photo and created the memory? I wonder if ten years from now my writer friend will be writing another book on monsters and will be pulling her hair out trying to find that image of the Thunderbird she remembers seeing.

Oh, and not all memories of this photo are alike. This article includes the memory of a different image of the Thunderbird, and other reports say the creature was nailed to the wall of the barn, not the roof.

While I'm careful to use only public domain photos in this blog, I'm not sure these are. If they are really as old as they appear to be, than they are in the public domain. They could simply be old fakes. If they are modern fakes, then I'm in breach of copyright, but the only way the creator could sue me is if they admitted faking the photo! I'll take that chance. :-)

"I Want To Go To The Science Museum"

When you hear your 2 1/2 year-old son say this, you know you're doing something right. As I mentioned in a previous post, Julian has become obsessed with the Oxford Museum of Natural History. Now when he wakes up he asks to go there. He needs to see the Iguanodon and play with the microscope, after all.

Sad to say, I'm now in Missouri and he and his mother are back in Madrid. Apparently he really liked being home for a couple of days, then started getting upset because he couldn't do all his favorite Oxford activities.

I know what you mean, kid, American microbrews are nothing compared to good, honest English real ales.

Well, at least we'll be back in Oxford for six months next year.

These past two weeks have been interesting from a parenting point of view. Julian has always been an active and observant kid, but being in a different country, and being in a small town instead of in the center of Madrid, really opened his eyes. He got to feed ducks for the first time, climb trees, play by the river, all the stuff country kids take for granted. He was amazingly energetic, ate hugely, slept like a log, and learned a bunch of English. Hopefully we'll be able to schedule some regular periods of fresh air from now on.

Raising A Museum Junkie

One of the best parts about parenting is seeing your kid excited about something you love, and I've discovered that Julian is a bit of a museum junkie like his papa. We're in Oxford at the moment, and I've been taking care of him in the mornings while Almudena works, and then she takes over while I work in the afternoons. Part of our morning routine is to go to the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, where he gets to touch ammonites, pet a stuffed cheetah, and stare at dinosaurs. He's even learned how to use the zoom and focus on a microscope, even though he's not yet three.

It's good exercise too, because he runs all over the place. His attention span doesn't stay on anything long (the record is fifteen minutes on the microscope) but he'll flit from display to display for an hour or more before wanting to go off to University Park to play football or climb trees. My proudest moment as a museum-loving dad came when he learned his first dinosaur word--iguanodon!!! He's also learned ammonite, malichite, and tyrannosaurus rex, although he has trouble pronouncing that one.

Do I have a scientist in the making?

Photo of Oxford University Museum of Natural History interior by Michael Reeve, 30 May, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Photo of Iguanodon Bernissartensis at the Museum voor Natuurwetenschappen in Brussels, Belgium by Paul Hermans, 28th of December 2007, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons