What a strange and fascinating creature Homo sapiens is.

Sometimes I just sit in coffeehouses listening with half an ear to other people's conversations. I don't try to track a single conversation, partly because it is none of my business, partly because I'm not interested in the narrative except insofar as it illustrates the range of human interests.

One couple is going through the Tribune's listing of garage sales in an earnest, though not very intense, debate about which ones are most worth checking out. A small cluster of investment counselors are pretending to work, but they are really swapping sales stories from their travels to the small towns of North Dakota. Some of those stories are colorful. Each one slips out of the conversation and back, without leaving the table, to check e-mail and return some texts.

Two men at another table are talking about the prospects of the Chicago Cubs with an intensity one would expect to see in bilateral negotiations about nuclear proliferation. Statistics are flying back and forth as if they were missile throw weights. These men are arguing according to formal rules of logic they would never use if they were talking politics or a domestic issue. I hear glimpses of a friendly but serious dispute about how much difference a great reliever really makes in the game.

Says one: Obama is a radical liberal and we should not be hoodwinked.

A woman in her 60s is showing her friends her newest scrapbook project. This is not your mother's scrapbook, in which a bunch of flat items (with the occasional pressed rose) were attached with doubled-over (not even double-sided) tape and black triangular corner frames that had about a 40 percent failure rate. This is scrapbooking on crack. Each page is a kind of 30-by-30-inch work of art, complete with decals, hand-cut mats and frames, tiny stiff paper clipped by a miniature scissors into a lattice-work pie topping, There are flags and banners and ribbons and "Welcome to Disney World" signs appliqued on an extremely thin canvas. Items can be attached to the page that have moving parts. There are things that speak or sing if you touch them or smell like pumpkin and cinnamon just when you turn the page from October to November. Have you ever seen a great scrapbook? They are magnificent.

In this instance, in the coffeeshop, it is clear that her friends love her dearly but are not so sure about "this scrapbooking addiction," which is how they describe it later.

Says another: Ron Paul is the only candidate that the Founding Fathers could approve.

A group of four women in early middle age are talking in gentle earnestness about a passage from the Book of Luke. One of the four is a little sarcastic, much to the amusement of the other three. They close with a quiet prayer. For some reason that makes me well over in admiration that we live in a place where you see a fair amount of that in public spaces.

I love the range of human interests. How wonderful that this one creature on earth has this kind of ingenuity and imagination and inventiveness and curiosity. An antelope is to my mind one of the supreme miracles of creation. But it cannot build the Pantheon at Rome or get into an argument about federal grazing policy with its neighbor. On the one hand, having amassed the world's foremost collection of Elvis decanters may not seem quite on the same plane as Leonardo da Vinci or Michael Jordan, but there is something delightful about it nevertheless - for its sheer exuberance and zaniness.

Someone in Arkansas has the largest Pez dispenser collection in the world. Ah, but a banker in Orem, Utah, is making a run at the title. He has mortgaged his house. It's not funny. I know a man, a dear friend, who began collecting books about the Lewis and Clark Expedition and wound up double- and triple-mortgaging his house, working his credit cards like a juggler, and literally sleeping with a shotgun on his chest for two years because he did not have a home security system.

I know someone who has the goal of actually stepping foot in every county of the United States. From several hours of listening to the lecture that might be called, "Why County Collecting Is a Serious Cultural Enterprise," and - what is worse - being convinced that she was right, I joined the club as a non-participating associate member. I can tell you this much about the cult. There are some counties that are isolated by water or the quirks of the U.S.A.-Canada border. You have to really want to go to those counties, at very considerable expense, and when you get there and put your foot on the ground you have achieved your goal. May as well get back on the boat taxi.

I know a woman in California who is the world's second-ranked geocacher. This involves a global positioning satellite receiver (GPS), maps, a willingness to travel a lot and scramble, and a pot of gold at the end of the journey. There is a funny space alien action figure in one cache and a poem in praise of light in another. You have no idea how much rummaging around the desert and among deserted city lots geocaching involves. The elect are always scrambling up Mount Shasta or snorkeling in the waters of the Gulf of California. The people who do this are committed to it in a highly disciplined way. They develop strategies. They have geocaching conventions. I admire the practitioners more than the hobby. Keeping a spirit of adventure and imagination alive in life is the key to happiness.

One person lives to rebuild classic motorcycles. Another likes to take a twilight sauna no matter what. One crochets four evenings per week like a machine. Another micro-tunes a salt water aquarium. There are stamp collectors and people who prefer to spend their evenings at the bar and lovers of NASCAR, people who run 10 miles every dawn, ground blizzard or no, and poets and short-story writers (mostly young) who know they are going to get published soon, but fear maybe not, too.

What a species! A journey to the moon and a collection of Nazi memorabilia. A heart transplant and fantasy football and the incomparable music of North Dakota's troubadour and number one voice, Chuck Suchy. The Louvre and the World's Largest Pelican. Science has taught us that the rest of the animals, at least, are much more "civilized," talkative, and complex than we like to pretend, yet we alone have developed to the point that we can open ourselves up and repair our bodily mechanisms. Humans are the only animal that can cheat or at least postpone death by sheer ingenuity and that lovely opposable thumb.

Hard to think all this is random.

(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute. He is also the Theodore Roosevelt Scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Clay at Jeffysage@aol.com.)