Laughing Knees

Grunts, Squawks, Chirps and Other Naming History

“Laughing~Knees” is so named from the condition that mountain walkers get when descending for a long time. With fatigue the knees begin quivering with each step. In Japan walkers proclaim, “Hiza ga waratteru!” ( My knees are laughing! ).

“butuki” is a slightly misinformed interpretation of the Tagalog (a Filipino language) word, “butiki”, which means “gecko”. In the Philippines, butiki are traditionally revered for their watch-gecko status as insect eaters. They are respected members of the household and commonly seen in every home’s walls. A legend goes that at 3:00 every afternoon all butiki in the country descend to kiss the ground. I took this name as an Asian writer of nature in a sea of Western nature writers, and as a symbol of the possibility of human harmony with nature.

As to me, my name is Miguel Arboleda. I am a German/ Filipino/ African-American (my father is Filipino-American, my mother, German) who grew up in Germany, America, and Japan. I am a writer and illustrator living in Chiba, also teaching English at Josai University in Chiba. I love mountain walking, bicycle travel, and sea kayaking, but most of all I just love being out with wild creatures in wild places, taking time to sit still or stroll, looking as close as my eyes can focus without tipping forward into the bramble.

I’ve also been called various other human sounds like “Bamboo Pole” or “Walking Stick”, because I used to be so thin. “Carburetor” or “Umbrella”, because of my last name, or “My Girl” or ‘I’m not calling you Migwell, so get used to “Mike”’. Many of my Japanese friends who hike with me call me “Ame-Otoko” (rain man), because nearly every time I head out to the mountains it inevitably rains. When I played Dungeons and Dragons in college, the name I most often went by was “Philkus Fleetnight”, an assassin of conscience. In the fencing team I was a member of I was called variously, “Rubberband Man” and “Frog” (most often spoken in the same soft manner as Grasshopper’s master in the television series, “Kung Fu”), because of my flexibility and jumping lunge, and later “D’Artagnan” (pronounced, of course, in the American vernacular, “DarTAGyon”), because I always lost to the strongest woman in the group, who had an uncanny knack for targetting, and hitting, the family jewels. And, of course, “Nature Boy”, who “is going to marry a cockroach when he grows up”, because I loved spending time in the fields hunting for insects. I never did get around to marrying a cockroach, but one of the first things that endeared my wife to me was when she stopped along a country roadside and picked up a praying mantis to study it. “My kind of woman!” I thought!

Acknowledgments

A lot of time and sweat went into both learning how to make this website and in actually running it, but I couldn’t have gotten started on it without the help of a few people.

In the very early days three and a half years ago, I hadn’t a clue as to what a blog was, and forget having the first clue as to how to get started. Thanks, then, to Jeremy Hedley of Antipixel and Kurt Easterwood of Hmmn for taking the time to answer my desperate calls for help on coding and with implementing the photo gallery. To MJ of Cerebral Soup I give a most special thanks for spending several hours online in the middle of the night with a complete stranger, helping me to install the dreaded Moveable Type. Such generosity and patience are more appreciated than the (as yet still unfulfilled) promise of a beer can really compensate for.

When I started this online journal I wrote in a fog, not really having any idea what I was doing on the internet, for all to see. In the midst of the tumult of the mad last five years I suddenly discovered a becalmed spot in the middle of the storm. For encouragement, inspiration, and intellectual stimulation my hat is off to Pica and Numenius of Feathers of Hope and the now defunct (or hibernating?) Ecotone. It is they, as much as the nature writers I hold most dear to my heart: Barry Lopez, Annie Dillard, Robert Finch, Edward Abbey, Gretel Ehrlich, and Richard Nelson, plus the wonderful patrons of belief and hope from the Glenwood Gathering: J. Parker Huber, Aina Barten, Robert Finch, George Russell, Scott Russell Sanders, and Frederick Taylor who all started me on my road to writing about the natural world and helped me fall in love with the life of sustainable lyricism. And of course my heros Jane Goodall, Jacques Cousteau, George Schaller, and David Attenborough, who showed me the real world from that first moment when I saw the hatching praying mantis nymphs outside my kitchen window in Queens, New York.

And of course there are those most dear to me, who, through all and everything watched the canyons in me erode into new configurations, and helped me grow into a better person, most especially my wife, who endured the evenings as I sat until dawn trying to learn CSS and the cryptic joys of WordPress

Information

All the graphics and photographs on the site are done by me, and certainly I now spend far too much time tweaking them for the blog.

All the computer work is done on a Macintosh G4 Desktop and a G4 iBook. I grieve for any user of that popular OS from an alternate universe.

Software I use is Fireworks 8, PhotoShop CS, Painter 9, and Graphic Converter for images and graphics, Transmit 2.6 for FTP, ecto for off-line weblog writing, and mostly Apple’s default browser Safari for browsing. Blogging is done with the very flexible and well-supported WordPress, though I’ve been considering TextPattern for quite some time now. The illustrations are mainly hand-drawn pencil sketches that are scanned into the computer and then colored using watercolor brushes in Painter.

For photographs I use a Nikon D70s, a digital SLR that, though heavier than my old, manual Nikon FM2, is more versatile, with a much greater image capacity, and far cheaper to prepare the images. Mainly I use a Tamron 24-135 mm zoom lens, with little else. When I want to go light I use either a Ricoh GR1s rangefinder camera, or a Nikon Coolpix 5400 digital camera. I’m still very much of a color slide film and B & W photographer, and am only beginning to really get the hang of digital photography.

Footprints

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• Footprints

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