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In April, Bill took an exhilarating, inspiring, and fun trip to St. Louis and Washington University Med School. He visited old friends and scientific heroes, gave a seminar, and joined in festivities of various sorts. On Friday night, Ellen and Bob Wilkinson hosted a dinner party with live bluegrass music. That's Mark Willard on fiddle, Carl Rovainen on banjo, and Bob on mandolin. There was some heavy dancing from Melissa and Jeannie Wilkinson and Helen Huettner.
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On Saturday, Carl picked up Bill and they drove off into the splendor of the Missouri springtime countryside, along with the two Rovainen dogs, Caleb and Meramec (Merry). The dogwoods have never put on a finer show. The two young men hiked the trail at the Valley View Glade, where they saw the junipers creeping back into the open glades (the Indians had kept things clear by burning). Wildflowers grew profusely - the paintbrush ranged from bright yellow through pink to red.
They arrived at the Rovainen homestead on the Meramec River near Pacific, Missouri shortly after noon. The house, which looks west into spectacular sunsets, perches on a bluff about a hundred feet above the river. Canoe trips both upstream (Saturday) and downstream (Sunday, with Ottie Rovainen, in his red flannel shirt and beard, which mark him as a native) revealed the quiet power of the river, which had been at flood stage the week before. In the images below, that's Carl pointing to the high point of the Flood of '81, and not the lamprey in the adjacent image, which Ottie caught (attached to a bluegill, as I recall), but everybody knows that Carl is the True Father of Lamprey Neurobiology. By the way, the sign ("No anything") actually is in Guyana, South America, where Carl went on a rain forest course recently, and not in Missouri.) In about a 40 minute stretch, Ottie caught 15 fish (6 species, plus a lamprey).
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