The McCollumn - 4/20: 'Happy as a herper'

An oddly cooperative Graptemys ernsti.

More Nerodia fasciata than you could shake a stick at (and I literally did at one point).

And, of course, the Drymarchon couperi, the most impressive specimen we came across all weekend.

Confused? Don’t worry; I was, too; just blame Carolus Linnaeus, that Swedish lothario.

For most of this last weekend, I listened to field herpetologists banter back and forth during the group’s trek into the Conecuh National Forest.

More than a dozen “herpers,” as they call themselves, descended upon the Conecuh area, and spent the better part of the weekend walking creek beds, pondsides and abandoned trails, turning up underbrush and logs, all in search of various rare or hard-to-find reptiles and amphibians.

Several had lists of creatures they “had” to see while on the trip, composing of relatively common yet still unseen animals like the barking tree frog to “lifer” finds like a coral snake or a rainbow snake.

Me ... well, I was there just to take it all in, really.

While this trip would be my second annual sojourn into the Conecuh Forest in search of snakes, I was not an official member of the group, made ever more apparent by my lack of understanding simple binomial nomenclature for any of the specimens found.

Folks would be rattling off statistics, distribution maps and behavioral patterns of various animals as if they were speaking about their only daily habits, and I was left to practice my “smile and nod” technique for most, if not almost all of the weekend.

These people not only knew their stuff, but could discuss in such a way to where only they truly knew to what they were referring, content area experts whose language barrier was nearly impenetrable, even to a vigilant English major like myself.

Were you there, you might have heard me call out “I think I found a frog,” only to have another group member call out a cry of “Bufo terrestris,” indicating both a Southern toad and the fact I lack the ability to differentiate between frogs and toads.

They were professionals; I, the very definition of amateur.

I spent most of my weekend watching and observing, taking in the masters as they practiced their hobby, and I was struck by one major thing:

I wish I enjoyed anything as much as these folks enjoy looking for reptiles and amphibians.

To see the joy and elation on people’s faces as they found their prey and began snapping dozens of photos to post to “the forum,” was to see a joy so pure, as one seldom sees it outside of children on the morning of any major gift-giving holiday.

It might have been just the small sight of a salamander, but these folks reacted as if they had just seen a movie star or a space alien.

While it sounds silly to say, I was almost jealous of their joy, angry that there was no similar stimulus to bring me happiness.

I should have known to wait for joy to come to me.

10:45 p.m., Saturday evening.

Standing in the middle of a series of small ponds, watching one of the young members of our group, clad in khaki shorts and sandals, wade into a pond where cottonmouths had been sighted a night before and begin pulling up banded water snake after banded water snake.

I look up to a moonless sky of bounteous, gleaming stars.

I hear a hectic cacophony of various frogs and toads surrounding me, putting Aristophanes’ croaking chorus to shame. Breke-kek-kek, my ax.

A slight breeze touches my face, cooling the beads of sweat attempting to escape down my forehead.

In that moment, there was some inexplicable feeling, a sense that all was right with the world and my place within it, however insignificant that role may be, a bit player in a cast of billions upon billions.

It was a moment that seemed to last a lifetime as I took in the spectacle of natural wonder and beauty around me.

I pick up my left foot to begin walking again, bringing it down with an unforeseen squoosh into mud and water that saturated my shoe and sock, breaking the thought and ending the cosmic moment.

Ah, well. Worth it, says I.

Opelika Observer Staff Editorial - 4/13: Why we can 'never forget'

Next Thursday, April 19, marks National Holocaust Remembrance Day, a time when as a nation we are supposed to come together to memorialize and remember the lives of the more than six million Jews (and five million others) who died in the terrible murders enacted by Germany’s Nazi regime.

Here in East Alabama, we have only one living Holocaust survivor: Opelika Observer editorial board member and longtime Opelikan Henry J. Stern.

Stern and his immediate family immigrated to the U.S. legally in 1937. While he and few others escaped the horrible fate of the concentration camps, other family members were not so lucky.

Stern searched for 60 years to locate any family members he could, sometimes flipping through phone books and calling any Sterns he might see in his journeys throughout the country.

Finally, thanks to the help of a website, Stern located a living relative, a cousin, Fred Hertz, living in Durham, North Carolina.

Stern and Hertz were able to meet and reminisce with one another, before Hertz sadly lost his life.

Now, there is one less person left to tell the tale of an eyewitness, one less one who was there.

We do an excellent job of educating the public about the Holocaust as a historical event, framing it through facts and figures and painting it as a major part of the effects of World War II and the Nazi regime.

Middle school and high school classes read pieces of literature like “The Diary of Anne Frank” or Elie Wiesel’s “Night,” providing narrative accounts of some of the atrocities committed on European Jews by the Nazis.

While this education is admirable, we feel nothing best resonates with people more than anecdotal evidence - having something happen to someone they know.

With his visit to Opelika Middle School this week, Henry Stern has insured another group of students will spend the rest of their lives knowing they knew East Alabama’s last Holocaust survivor.

They’ve heard his story, shook his hand and had him sign a memento.

Thanks to Stern’s generous donation of a DVD of his various interviews and other artistic materials, Stern has insured that future generations of Opelika students will have the same opportunity to “meet” Henry Stern, even if the man himself has passed on.

With each passing year, we lose more Holocaust survivors, finding fewer and fewer people left to tell the first-hand tales people so desperately need to hear.

There will be those who will attempt to deny the Holocaust, saying that such an evil would be unthinkable for man to commit upon man.

While such acts are inhumanely evil, they did happen, and six million Jewish lives lost can not and will not ever be denied.

If we are ever allowed to forget or deny those events happened, they might be allowed to happen again.

God forbid we ever forget. Never again.

We must fight prejudice and intolerance where we find it, and snuff out ignorance with knowledge.

We all feel blessed to know and work with Henry Stern, as many of you do, too.

He’s an Opelika institution, a friend and generous benefactor to numerous causes and charities.

He’s a self-named “good ol’ redneck from Alabama,” which ain’t bad for a boy born Heinz Julius Stern in Germany.

He’s a Holocaust survivor, one whose story will continue to ring out and be told long after he is gone.

We owe it to him and so many others who didn’t make it out to make sure such horrors will never reoccur.

Six million lives lost, and countless others irrevocably damaged by the loss of kin.

Never forget.

Never again.