Treebeard's Homepage

Who is Treebeard?

Treebeard as the zig-zag man
on the Deschutes River in Oregon.
Treebeard is really Marc Kummel. I took the nickname when I worked as a naturalist at the Santa Barbara County Schools' Outdoor School, taking 6th graders on nature walks, starting two decades ago. Everyone had a camp name. I worked with Hoot, Bullroar, Crow, Sparse, Chemise, Toyon, Huck L. Berry, Snakemann, Mars, Sage, Hawk, Willow, Umpqua, Frankie and the Lon Ranger, Mamma Bear, Cielo, Harpo, Monterey Shale, Redtail, Sundance, Wise Fox, and many more. These are people I love! We influenced a generation of local kids.

"Treebeard" is from Tolkien, of course. It fits. Like the literary Treebeard, I am tall and bearded and a bit slow to get moving. Think twice before you adopt a nickname...it can follow you for years! But I'm happy with this one.

Wittgenstein
I was a surfer kid in Santa Monica in the 60's and a math student at Harvey Mudd College. I studied philosophy at UCSB and got as far as a M.A./C.Phil. and a milkcrate full of unfinished thesis. I got sidetracked by natural history and teaching kids. I don't think philosophy hurt me.

I live with Julie and our kids Ewan and Ryan on top of San Marcos Pass, over the mountains behind Santa Barbara, California, USA. Julie and I have lived on the pass for over 25 years, just far enough (?) from town. I teach science and shop classes at Dunn Middle School in Los Olivos. Julie parents, paints, gardens, and nurses at the Santa Barbara Rehabilitation Institute Outpatient Clinic. Ewan just graduated from Dunn School and will attend Reed College in Portland. Ry is a junior at Santa Barbara High School. They speak for themselves.

This is an image map, so you can click on any of us. That's me on the left, then Ryan, Julie, and Ewan.

My Passions include local history and natural history, esp. mushrooms, wildflowers, Chumash sites, geology, and fossils; basic, masm, perl, and the Net; Bartok, ska, classic jazz, and finger-picking delta blues; sound hardware and algorithmic composition; old movies; astronomy and navigation; old underground comix and Carl Barks' classics; gadgeteering; fly-fishing; philosophy and sci-fi; the desert; understanding everything!
My Style is DIY; libertarian; eclectic; homebrew; cluttered; funky, but it works.
My Creed is the Hippocratic Oath: try to do good, but do no harm. Good advice for a teacher, but I'm harder on myself!

San Marcos Pass is one of the richest places I know for natural history. The Pass is a basin on top of a mountain range, with twice the rainfall of Santa Barbara on the coast, over 80 inches in a wet year. We're perched midway between desert and redwood forest. Where else can you find surf, swimming holes, abalone, steelhead trout, wild huckleberries, and Great Basin Sagebrush all within ten miles?
I'm a collector. I maintain a home museum with labeled collections of local mushrooms, plants, insects, rocks, and fossils. Comics too! Web publishing is a new passion that's been keeping me too busy, but at least there's something to show for the work.
I've been collecting lots of Web links, especially Natural History sites. But I need to rethink this. I rarely use my own lists. I do searches instead. The Web is too dynamic to capture in a list!

I'm gathering some pieces I've written into a Rants and Writes page.

I've been (slowly) working on my on-line flora of Woody Plants of the Central Santa Ynez Mountains. I have notebooks (and a head-full) of observations, Julie's drawings and 1000's of my photos, and a forest outside my door. I made a Basic program to build a database, and I wrote a Perl CGI script to work my search page (but it's not yet in my server). Now I have to enter *lots* more data, scan my photos, and do some real writing. Read the Introduction I wrote for the DMS Science Fair. Don't hold your breath.

Friends and students keep asking the same questions about the Net, so I've answered on the Web once and for all. Check out Homebrew Homepages and my Unix Cheat Sheet. My Server now supports CGIWRAP so I'm working on a Homebrew CGI page.

I've been collecting Santa Barbara links, including local schools, music, history, and natural history. I also have a list of local Internet Service Providers.

I've been programming in BASIC (mostly) for almost 20 years, but I've kept my work to myself. So I've been cleaning up some old DOS/WIN programs to make them available on the Net. Check out Treebeard's BASIC Vault to see what I've been up to.

I've revised the Dunn Middle School Home Page for my school. I made the framework. Now the kids and teachers (including me) have to figure out how to actually use it and make it indispensable

I write a science/math/logic stumper every school week for the DMS Friday Newsnote. A growing collection of new and old stumpers is now available on my new Stumper Page, updated weekly when school is in session.

Despite my $.02 About Form and Content, I've been playing with "Netscape Enhancements". I suppose Frames, JAVA, VRML, JavaScript, and BFD are next. These pages should look great with any browser, including Lynx, which I like for its speed and automatic extraction of content. But I'm growing somewhat cynical about the Web. The World Wide BOOK, yes. The world wide CATALOGUE, who cares?!
Let me know what you think of these efforts!

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