Lake Michigan

photo by
Joanna Key

Polar Bears and Pegasus

collage and drawing
by Joanna Key

Museum Bear

California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco

photo by Joanna Key

Adjutant Stork

collage by Joanna Key

Two Deer in a Green World

collage by Joanna Key

X-mas at the Herpetarium

drawing by Joanna Key

Coyote and Snowflakes

drawing/collage by Joanna Key

Dog Star

collage by Joanna Key

Three and a Half Turkeys

collage by Joanna Key

The World According to Carp

collage by Joanna Key

The carp is known to be a tireless upstream swimmer that can even jump up a waterfall. So once a year Japanese parents will hang a line of carp wind socks outside their houses, one for each son, hoping their children will grow up to be tough like the carp and never give up.

Some kinds of carp are known for their eye-catching patterns and colors. These carp, called Koi, are raised as ornamental garden pond fish, specially bred like show dogs, fed color-enhancing foods, and kept in special water to create their unique colors and patterns: orange, gray, blue, calico like cats, turquoise with red fins and tail, an all-green metallic sheen, golden pine needles, sparkly iridescent scales, white with red head patches, red marks with black shadows, rings like a coral snake, yellow-and-black stripes like a road barrier.

But then there is the Silver Carp. Hearing the name, you might picture a sleek, shimmery fish gliding gracefully through the water. But, picture this instead: A Silver Carp will startle easily and come flying high out of a river or lake when the water is disturbed. The motor of a small boat is enough to bring on a storm of twenty-pound silver-carp missiles flying in all directions--even into a boat. Passengers can be thumped, pounded, and even knocked out by the leaping fish. And jumping Asian carp encountering a water skier can cause a terrible clash.

About fifty years ago, two types of Asian Carp, as an invasive species native to China and Siberia, were innocently imported to help clear catfish ponds of unwanted algae and vegetation in the US South. The smaller Silver Carp are the ones that jump, while the others, the hundred-pound Bighead Carp, stay below the surface. What happened was the carp got unintentionally relocated by flood waters, escaping from their small ponds to life on the Mississippi River, where they made their way upstream. Over five hundred miles of that big muddy river make up the western border of Illinois. From the Mississippi, the carp migrated down other rivers, including the Missouri, the Ohio to the Wabash, and the Illinois rivers, threatening to enter the Great Lakes, with their population multiplying exponentially year after year.

Asian carp survive in conditions where other fish die out, and they out-compete and replace more popular fish through their tendency to vacuum huge amounts of plankton through their gills as they swim. They have no need to bite on a fisherman’s bait with that diet. Virtually no predators and not many Americans want to eat these carp. It’s not that they taste bad, but their meat is heavily laced with tiny bones. Some of them are caught and used for fertilizer or animal feed, but they’re a menace, and we can’t get rid of them.

Fish springing up in the air look more mechanical than alive, unbelievable, spring-loaded--funny and horrifying at the same time. Silver carp are like an exploded version of themselves, popcorn with fins and a tail. They seem to have lost their minds as they hurl themselves up into the air in trance-like abandonment, colliding with each other, smacking into humans, and suicidally landing on the floors of boats.

When navigating the rivers of the Midwest, you are now entering the Carp Zone.

Elephant at the Macon County Fair

photo by Joanna Key

Goldfish Bowls at the Fair

photo by Joanna Key
County Fair 2011

Funnel Cakes

photo by Joanna Key
County Fair 2011

Fish behind Stained Glass Window

collage by Joanna Key

The Snowflake Font

I wrote this after reading that cursive writing is officially obsolete, replaced by keyboarding lessons in the schools, and some kids can't even read cursive.

Lily Pads

photo by Joanna Key

Summer Fireflies and Crow

collage by Joanna Key

Waves

collage by Joanna Key

Deer

collage by Joanna Key

Diagonal Rabbits

collage by Joanna Key

Elephant on a Pedestal

collage by Joanna Key

Bird Thief, Squealers

collage by Joanna Key

Haiku

gout--
his big toe is full of uric acid crystals
like a geode

Raccoon

by Joanna Key
pencil drawing/collage, illustration for the journal Bluestem

Squirrel

pencil drawing/collage
illustration for 2011 print issue of the journal Bluestem

Ocelot

collage with paint/Joanna Key

Gila Monster

collage by Joanna Key

Valentine for JR

pencil drawing/collage by Joanna Key

"Year of the Rabbit 2"

collage/drawing by Joanna Key

Happy Chinese New Year: It's the Year of the Rabbit

collage and pencil drawing
by Joanna Key

Backbone Rug

drawing by Joanna Key

The Cat and the Fiddle

collage by Joanna Key

animal

colored pencil drawing by Joanna Key

Elephant in the Room II

collage and pencil drawing/
by Joanna Key

Goat Dance

Collage/pencil drawing by Joanna Key--previously published in black/white on a yellow background on the cover of Karamu

Bar Graph

collage by Joanna Key

Two Dolphins

collage by Joanna Key

Knot

drawing/collage by Joanna Key

Running to Me

collage by Joanna Key

Who Wrote the Book of Kells?

collage by Joanna Key

The Exit-Ramp Blues

Driving on Interstate 57 through Illinois, cornfields to the left, soybeans to the right, monotony. Am I there yet? Where’s my exit? Well, in 1956, to help us all get there faster, the Federal-Aid Highway Act launched the largest public works project ever undertaken: the U.S. Interstate Highway System. The grand plan was for a streamlined network of high-speed freeways linking all the cities in the country. There would be “controlled access” to these roads, to eliminate stops at intersections and traffic signals. There would be at least two lanes in each direction, to take out the risk of head-on collisions while passing. There would be a wide median to separate cars traveling opposite ways. There would be a broad shoulder to pull onto in emergencies, with rumble safety strips on some shoulders to scare drifting drivers back into alertness. Motorists could sail over railroad tracks below bridges without having to look or listen for train whistles. The roadways would have no sharp curves, and steep hills would be leveled, so a motorist could lock into a 50-mph speed (this speed limit has since been raised, of course) and could put his mind and, in some cases, his car, on cruise control.

The 47,000 miles of today’s interstate system have changed the way people live. Lives are saved when sick or injured people can be rushed to distant hospitals without delay, and commuters are more likely to have jobs far from their homes. Emergency evacuations, as for hurricanes or floods, can be more efficient when all traffic lanes are made outbound on both sides of the disaster area’s highways (“contraflow lane reversal”). Today, 24 percent of all traffic cruises down the interstates, and 41 percent of all truck freight is moved along the unclogged arteries of our highway system. The busiest interstate highway, I-405 in Los Angeles, accommodates 390,000 vehicles each day. In one section of I-10 through Houston, the highway has 26 lanes. In lesser traveled parts of western Texas and Utah, interstate drivers are even allowed to go 80 mph.

There is some logic to the naming of the highway grid: The odd-numbered highways run north and south, with the lowest numbers on the West Coast, leaving the even numbers to the east-west interstates, where the numbering starts in the South. The longest interstate, I-90, runs over 3,000 miles, connecting the dots between Seattle and Boston. Interstate 80 leads from San Francisco to Teaneck, New Jersey. Travel east from Los Angeles through Phoenix, Houston, and New Orleans, to Jacksonville, Florida, all the way on I-10. Go north from Laredo, Texas, to Duluth, Minnesota, on I-35 without having to look at a map even once. And I-95 takes you from the beaches of Miami straight on to the chilly Canadian border.

So, the U.S. interstate highway system is an amazing achievement. That does not change the fact that some people, myself included, absolutely hate traveling on the interstate. What happens when all distractions and inconveniences are taken away is that mind-numbing boredom sets in. The highway becomes like a conveyor belt predictably and uneventfully shipping travelers from place to place. The tires vibrate on the smooth pavement, and the engine hums. The mind, not needing to make any decisions, is no longer aware of what the body is doing. An interstate driver can easily be lulled into a hypnotic trance as he stares at the endless white lines on the highway. The bored motorist might try to fight drowsiness by turning up the radio and shifting channels from the classical station, singing along, or talking to other passengers or even to himself. To get more alert, he might turn off the heat and open a window, or desperately read out loud the signs and billboards (although by law, the billboards have to be over 600 feet from the road, thus more easily ignored). Sometimes it helps to chew gum or mindlessly eat snacks.

Hypnosis is not the only danger on the highway. A gusty wind across the open interstate might try to blow a car into another lane like a cat paw repeatedly batting a mouse. Trucks can easily dominate the road. High-profile vehicles can overturn in strong storms or jackknife on ice or snow. Work zones with their orange plastic cones can cause confusion and frustration. Cities that have outgrown their interstates have to deal with rush-hour bottlenecks, and their traffic can grind to a nerve-wracking halt after breakdowns and accidents.

Travel on the interstate is all about getting there as planned, without any unexpected turn of events. However, even the most hell-bent travelers have to stop sometime, so along with the original interstate plans came the phenomenon of the interstate rest area. The interstate rest area perfectly complements the soullessness of the interstates. Not surprisingly, there is a horror movie called Rest Stop. A lot of rest area buildings have the tacky design style of the fifties and sixties: sawtooth roofs, cinder block walls. Rumpled travelers with glazed eyes stiffly head for the bathrooms, still feeling the road vaguely vibrating through their nerves. No commercial businesses are allowed to operate at rest stops, so all food and drinks are mechanically extracted from vending machines. The smell of the bathrooms keeps anyone from lingering too long in there. And why do they have to have those fuzzy mirrors?

So to prevent the highway blues, instead, I like to take my time and travel the “blue highways”—the back roads, two-lane blacktops, which used to be shown in blue on the old maps. On these roads, I can brake impulsively and pull over when I see a roadside attraction, or as soon as I am tired, hungry, thirsty, or in need of stretching or a nap. When driving on back roads through towns and cities, I can watch people going about their lives. Distractions are what make life interesting. Exit off the interstate, and look at something besides that truck’s grill looming in the rearview mirror.

Pegasus Was a Zebra

collage by Joanna Key

The Perfect Food

“Walking on eggshells” means being careful. Being very careful. When you buy food, the bag containing the egg carton gets the most attention between the checkout lane and your home refrigerator. An eggshell is easily broken by accidental dropping or crushing. But paradoxically, if you cup an egg in your hands and squeeze as hard as you can, it won’t break.

Eggs deserve their own holiday. They are the perfect food, containing the highest quality of protein at only 70 calories an egg, at the lowest cost—about eleven cents an egg. The reputation of eggs was damaged in the sixties and seventies and again in the nineties by warnings about high cholesterol that have since been disproven. Eggs contain all vitamins except vitamin C, and a lot of minerals. They improve your nervous system and brain function, memory, and eyesight and satisfy your appetite way longer than cereal in the morning. After all, the contents of an egg can be the life support system for a developing chicken--its whole universe for the first three weeks of its existence. When the chicken starts getting claustrophobic inside the egg, it manages to liberate itself by cracking the shell with a special “egg tooth” on its beak. The eggs you eat, of course, are not fertilized and contain no chickens. A hen forms an eggshell in less than a day, and delivers it with the blunt end first. The average hen lays about five eggs a week. She sits on her eggs to keep them warm and rotates them about four times an hour.

People like to peel things and legitimately play with their food, so hard-boiled eggs are always fun. You get to crack them all over and then strip away the shell fragments to expose the white rubbery layer below. Then you get to open up the white, to display a powdery wet yellow ball. Really, hard-boiled egg is a misleading term. The texture and taste are better if you just hard-cook the eggs: immerse them in water, bring it to a boil, and then turn it off and let the eggs sit in the water for about fifteen minutes. If you overcook an egg, the outside of the yolk can turn ugly, a greenish black from surfacing iron and sulfur, although it is still okay to eat. By the way, it is never hot enough (150 degrees F) to fry an egg on the sidewalk.

Some eggs have twin yolks, and some have as many as nine yolks. Some chicken eggs have brown shells. If a hen has red earlobes, she will lay brown eggs; if a hen has white earlobes, she will lay white eggs. An egg has a sort of oval shape, except one end is always bigger than the other end. Inside the wide end, raw eggs have an air pocket that gets bigger with age. The raw yolk is of varying shades of yellow, depending on the hen’s diet, and the rest of the egg’s liquid is an opalescent “white.” An eggshell is porous and can absorb smells from your refrigerator, so do not store them in those egg-shaped holders in your refrigerator door. Market eggs have had their protective sealant coating scrubbed off, although they are then coated with oil to keep in moisture and keep out bacteria. The oil should be cleaned off with soapy water before dyeing an egg. An egg can be naturally dyed with hot water added to blueberries, red cabbage, beets, spinach, dill, turmeric, paprika, curry powder, or onion skins, or with grape juice, tea, or coffee.

Where in this nursery rhyme does it say that Humpty Dumpty was an egg?
Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.

Eight-Eyed Webmasters

On Facebook, you can join a group called “I don’t care if the spider’s ‘not hurting anyone,’ I want it dead.” That sums up the attitude of a lot of the arachnophobics among us. But take a moment to reconsider spiders, if you just have a case of everyday bug-loathing. Let’s see if we can knock the spider off the top ten most-hated animals list (leaving the company of snakes, cockroaches, pigeons, and rats, etc.).

Spiders are artists: they are silk spinners and (many are) web weavers and also wily predators. The web-building spider releases strands of silk from its spinnerets. In the typical orb style of spiderweb, she strings the thicker, stronger radial threads out from the hub of the snare. She then connects the radials using stickier spiral threads, tiptoeing gingerly on her seven-sectioned legs, and grasping at strands with her opposable bristles and claws, managing not to get stuck in her own web. Spider silk, strong as nylon, can stretch over twice its length. The silk is resistant to fungi and bacteria and is sometimes used to seal human wounds. Those cobwebs draped across the dusty corners and shelves of uncleaned attics and basements can last forever, without rotting or decomposing. Birds like to use spider silk to build their nests. When the strands of an outdoor web lose their stickiness, the spider recycles the protein by eating her web and spinning a new one. In addition to the typical spiral orb-shaped web, other spiders create tangle webs (cobwebs), funnel webs, tubular webs (up trees and along the ground), sheet webs, or tent or dome webs.

The ballet of the capture begins with, say, a fly blundering into the web and adhering to the sticky threads. The spider sitting nearby knows she’s caught something because she senses the vibrations. Even though she has eight eyes arranged in a freakish pattern around her head, her eyesight is poor. She pounces on the fly and injects venom with her fangs. Then she wraps her prey in a silk winding-sheet and waits for it to die. People usually work all day to earn money to buy their food. Some spend their day hunting or fishing for their food. But the trapper, like a spider, has the superior strategy, when you think about it.

Most spider venom is not toxic enough to affect humans unless a person is allergic to it. Most spiders cannot even puncture our skin because their fangs are too small and weak. Spiders usually only bite if they are trapped in your clothing or swatted at while crawling on your skin. Pay no attention to the creepy urban legend about the nest of black widow spiders that lived in a lady’s beehive hairdo and eventually killed her by biting her scalp. You see, spiders are mostly harmless and even beneficial, doing their share of keeping down the insect population. House spiders kill flies, crickets, and other insects. Don’t put a house spider outdoors to save its life because it will probably not survive. House spiders do not “come in from the cold” through cracks under doors and in window frames. They spend their whole lives in your house. You find spiders in your bathtub because the tub sides are too slick for them to climb back up. Spiders are more active in the evening, and the ones you might see in your house could be males out looking for females. The shy females and young, meanwhile, are probably hiding next to their webs in your crawl space or storage areas, under stairs, between walls and floors, or behind appliances.

Most spiders leave a trailing dragline as they walk or descend from a height. Spiderlings, newborn spiders, which are tiny and colorless, sail off for long distances at the end of a silk thread to wherever the wind delivers them. So spiders start life out by ballooning and then settle down for a short adult life--a season or a year of weaving. Who hasn’t stopped in awe on a hike through the woods, face-to-face with a sparkly dew-encrusted spiderweb?

If I still have not won you over to spider-appreciation, then maybe you should read or watch Charlotte’s Web sometime. “Day after day the spider waited, head down, for an idea to come to her. Hour by hour she sat motionless, deep in thought. Having promised Wilbur that she would save his life, she was determined to keep her promise. Charlotte was naturally patient. She knew from experience that if she waited long enough, a fly would come to her web; and she felt sure that if she thought long enough about Wilbur’s problem, an idea would come to her mind.”