Categorically Yes … and No

By: | August 14, 2026
Don’t I know you? (Trees in the Sierra Nevada)

Isn’t it satisfying to know the names of things? I just got back from a backpacking trip to the Sierra Nevada with a bunch of geologists. I learned that those pink rocks are full of piemontite, the green mineral around it is called epidote, the gray stuff is andalusite, and those long white crystals are wollastonite. The name is just the first part, of course: The geologists could rattle off the chemical formulas and knew at what temperatures and depths the minerals formed, which tells them the history of the rocks before they were uplifted and eroded so we can poke at them today. But the first part of knowledge, for a lot of things, is identifying, categorizing, naming. 

The one thing I wished I’d brought with me was my pocket-sized Pacific Coast tree finder (you always forget something). I last backpacked in the high Sierra in my 20s, and the trees were all familiar, but I couldn’t quite recall their names, like I was attending a big-number college reunion. I could tell a juniper from a fir from a pine, and I knew that the length and number of needles in a cluster distinguishes different pine species. Recognizing that these are like these is one thing, but I wanted the names. 

The birds were easier; I’ve had more experience with them. Hello, mountain chickadees with your white eyebrows! Kraa-kraa-kraa to you, too, Clark’s nutcracker. Oh, look, there’s a dipper! They are basically aquatic songbirds—seriously, they swim—and they live in mountain rivers. You know you’re in a good place if you see a dipper. 

Our brains are eager to categorize and name things. Psychologists call this tendency “psychological essentialism,” the idea that there are certain qualities we can use to assign things to their proper groups. It’s satisfying to identify something, to figure out whether you’re looking at a Carolina chickadee or a black-capped chickadee (which is harder than it sounds). 

But of course psychological essentialism can be pathological. Some people are way too committed to certain categories: boy/girl, black/white, sick/healthy, citizen/foreign, us/them. They’re upset when someone switches categories, refuses to be captured by one, or rejects the categorization scheme altogether. Appealing to essentialism is one way to rile up bigots and get them to vote. I’m not talking about people who stumble over new pronouns; we were all taught overly categorically. But we can all learn to reject the burning bigotry of gender essentialism, the insistence that there are non-overlapping, firmly bounded groups of “male” and “female,” and they get to decide who belongs in which group. Gender essentialists are wrong about a lot of things (so many things), and one of them is their appeal to biology (chromosomes are not definitive) or nature. 

Nature abhors a category. Plenty of animals switch sexes or have functionally more than two. As Agustín Fuentes points out, the whole entire purpose of sexual reproduction is variation. The basic categorical unit of taxonomy is the species, and we don’t even have a comprehensive definition of it. Ornithologists split and lump species all the time. Black-capped and Carolina chickadees hybridize, and their offspring are perfectly fertile, thank you. Gulls hybridize in many directions (gulls really get around). It’s satisfying to know the name of something, sure, but even more fascinating when something defies the limits of its name. 

Anyway, I guess I’m saying there are two categories of categories: those that are useful and those that are harmful. And categories can switch between the two depending on how we use them. It’s up to us to use them correctly and protect one another from those who don’t. 

Perfect Things

By: | August 12, 2026

We were walking past a line of shorebirds on the harbor’s breakwater when my son stopped me and pointed. “Does that bird only have one leg?”

About two dozen black turnstones — I didn’t recognize them at the time, I had to use All About Birds later — faced into the wind, broadside to the incoming waves. One of them was standing on one leg.

We peered at the bird. Was that another leg tucked up against its belly? Hard to say. We studied the other birds. Most of them were standing on one leg, too. “That would be a lot of one-legged birds,” we told each other. We tried balancing on one leg. “Seems tiring,” we agreed.

Continue reading →

Happy Final Weeks of Summer Camp (to all who celebrate)

By: | August 10, 2026

Subject: Final reminders

Dear Nature Wonder Wishing Family,

We’re so excited to have your child with us at Nature Wonder Wishing Camp next week. Please make sure that you read the parent guidebook and the camp code of conduct. You can find those documents in an email we sent six months ago that does not include the words ‘Nature’ ‘Wonder’ ‘Wishing’ or ‘Camp’.

We’re looking forward to a truly fantastic week with your Wishing Wonder Bug. Just a few reminders before camp begins:

Continue reading →

The Mountains that Matter Most

By: | August 7, 2026

Erling Haaland, the cool Norwegian soccer player, has a pretty fun and slightly unhinged social media presence. During the World Cup, a clip from his Instagram account resurfaced where he claimed, “Just raw dogged a 7 hour flight. No phone, no sleep, no water, no food. Only map. #easy”

I have a confession: I, too, fly like this. Not for 7 hours, because I do sleep or watch a movie on a transatlantic flight, and yes I drink water, because hydration is important, ok? But I love the airplane map, and I always start and end with it on my screen, if the plane seat back has a screen.

On my most recent flight, I noticed something on the map that I see every time, which confuses me and slightly irritates me. The thing I noticed on the map, just west of Denver, is a place called “Porcupine Hill.” 

I grew up in Denver. I spent a lot of my youth going into and around and back out of the mountains west of the city. Until its appearance on the map, I had never heard of this Porcupine Hill.

Surely there are more important mountains? Why would we not pick Mt. Elbert, the tallest mountain in Colorado? Or Mt. Blue Sky? Surely there are more famous ones, more iconic ones, more significant ones in terms of their history and their accessibility or lack thereof. This is Colorado, famously home to 54 peaks above 14,000 feet in elevation. What is this Porcupine Hill, which barely bumps up over the foothills at 10,210 feet? It’s just a mid-height peak near Idaho Springs. Why is this the mountain that defines Colorado within the United Airlines in-flight map? 

I finally remembered to search for an answer once we were back out of airplane mode. I found more than one Reddit thread asking the same line of questions. One post originated two years ago, but the most recent response is from last week: “My 20 flights into Denver so far this year all validate Porcupine Hill spotlight,” wrote a Redditor named ToughSuccotash2007. 

“I was just on a United flight and it’s still highlighted like it’s the most prominent mountain in Colorado. Other mountains show up and disappear depending on location and zoom level, but Porcupine Hill is always displayed and in a different color,” wrote RocTrailRunner.

I thought about asking the United social media team, which is unparalleled for a corporate account, because I feel like they might have some answers. Then I thought about sending a query as a journalist, because the public has a right to know. Why that mountain over any other?

And then I looked out at the mountain I live on, Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado Springs, the mountain that has become my home. It has three prominences, and its main peak reaches 9,500 feet-ish, a number I find hard to verify because that is how incredibly broken Google is. I know it is slightly shorter than Porcupine Hill.

It is not the biggest mountain around — that would be Pikes Peak, at 14,115 feet. There are many others west of Colorado Springs that crest 10,000 feet, like Mount Rosa or Almagre Mountain. But Cheyenne Mountain is the one I think about most. It is the mountain to which I belong, at least for now. 

It is my mountain, in other words. So maybe Porcupine Hill is that for someone, too. It could be a cartographer’s mountain. Maybe the person who inputs place names on FlightPath3D picked it because she climbed it as a child, and it was meaningful to her. Maybe she remembers visiting her grandparents who had a cabin near Porcupine Hill. 

It’s easy for us to see, and to use, the biggest mountains, like Mt. Blue Sky, Mt. Elbert, Longs Peak, Pikes Peak. They are special, for sure. But so are the smaller, less-familiar, less traversed mountains in my home state. They are not any less worthy. Neither is Porcupine Hill, I realized.

When I get on a plane again, next week, I will turn on the map and rawdog part of my flight like Haaland. But this time I will not be annoyed when I see Porcupine Hill. I will more likely feel a twinge of homesickness and empathy for my imagined cartographer, and her love of her favorite mountain. 

tennis courts in front of Cheyenne Mountain

Images by the author

Look up

By: | August 5, 2026
Credit: Katharine Andrews

On May 10, I leave my house in northern Washington state just after dawn. I drive alone along a braided river, over sagebrush plateaus, and through fields of golden flowers. Then one plane across the Cascades, and another across the Rockies, to finally land in my my childhood home in Colorado. I’ve come to stand alongside my dad as we observe the passing of his sister, my aunt. My oldest sister has come from Wisconsin; another cousin, from New York. There are cousins and an uncle and aunt in Denver; my mom and my brother and sister-in-law and nephew and niece in Boulder. Still others will gather on Zoom, to watch the service from a distance, because they can’t make the trip.

The night I arrive, I curl up in bed in the guest room at my parents’ house and scroll through news on my phone. I learn that a powerful solar storm is hurling great arcs of ions towards Earth, where they will cascade through the atmosphere in a light show that may be visible as far south as Florida and Alabama. The aurora borealis. It’s late, and I’m exhausted, but I pad into the living room to stand on the back of the couch and peer north through the high windows under the ceiling eave. Clouds and city lights blur the horizon, so I return to bed.

Should I? I wonder. I stare at the phone, then begin punching in every name I can think of back in the valley where I live. By the time I’m done, I have 28. I write a quick note, telling everyone to watch the sky. Maybe, being so much farther north, they will see what I can’t. Maybe they will pass the message on to others I didn’t think of, kicking off a sort of celestial phone tree that says simply, Look up. I pause again, fretting about how overwhelming a group text can be once replies start rolling in, and likes of replies, and replies to liked replies. Then, I hit send.

Notifications start buzzing immediately, and I worry that maybe I’ve already annoyed everyone. But messages and pictures keep coming. At first, there are faint white bands of light. Then, they glow weakly green, dancing alongside a bright moon. One friend laments that the aurora looks better and clearer in the photos than in the sky—the camera picking up things that human eyes cannot. I laugh and turn off the phone and go to sleep.

Credit: Joshua Porter
Credit: Leia Hansen

When I wake the next day, there are 30 new texts. This group of people, many of whom don’t know one another’s phone numbers and so aren’t sure who they’re talking to, have been telling each other where to look, and reporting back on what they’re seeing in the skies over their respective locations—Carlton, Twisp, Winthrop, Bear Creek, Davis Lake, Glacier, even Kelowna. I scroll down to find them exclaiming, “holy guacamole” and “this is wild.” Then the thread is mostly photos, as if words have fallen short. The greens grow deeper, then blend with pinks and reds, the images showing a many-vantaged view of what I can only describe as a full-on Ghostbusters sky—a shimmering rosette flanked by beams of color, billowing high above houses, trees, mountains.

Credit: Will Menzies
Credit: Eric Thorp

I scroll through a second time, then a third, feeling as elated as if I had seen the aurora myself, from all of these places at once. I get up and show my mom and my dad.

Across the world, people watched, for a few moments or a few hours. They reached out to others, who told others. And somehow, our combined attention made this momentous sight—the bright touch of our sun—even bigger. It magnified in the telling, in the shared experience, a collective awe reaching through and beyond all of us. We were small together, and part of a giant universe, together.

It occurs to me later as I watch my dad give my aunt’s eulogy that this is one reason why people gather. Watching the moon eclipse the sun, or the Earth’s shadow eclipse the moon. Watching two people join their lives and their communities at a wedding. Mourning the loss of someone we love, and celebrating what they made, and who they were, and who they were to us. That they live on through the stories we tell about them, and the new things we learn about their lives from one another. That we were small together, that we were part of a giant universe, together.

Credit: Katharine Andrews

This post originally appeared in May 2024, to honor my aunt Pricilla. I dedicate it here to my late aunt Mary Ellen and my late uncle Jim, both of whom we lost in the past year, and gathered this summer to remember.

Birds of the District of Columbia

By: | August 3, 2026
taxidermied blue jay on a twig in a museum case

Birds of the District of Columbia used to be a weird little secret at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, an exhibit I often had all to myself – a bunch of taxidermied birds in old-school wood and glass cases, lining the hallway around the basement auditorium.

On a recent visit to the museum, I discovered that the birds – with new labels, but cases that looked like they could be the originals – had been moved to a place that, while not exactly prominent, is at least stumble-upon-able, if you enter the dinosaur hall from the front, wander all the way to the back, and keep on going.

This appeared to be a common path, because a lot of other people were looking at the birds with me this time, speaking many languages.

The exhibit is supposed to cover all of the birds that have been sighted in the District of Columbia, and many of them are familiar – the house sparrow, various herons, a couple dozen ducks. Various thrushes and shorebirds. Raptors, like the ospreys I’ve seen flying along the Anacostia and the Potomac and fishing in the Tidal Basin. Seven species of woodpecker.

Three species that have been seen in D.C. are extinct now – the passenger pigeon and the Carolina parakeet, which I knew about, and the heath hen, which I didn’t. The internet tells me it’s a grouse that’s been extinct since the 1930s.

As I admired the cedar waxwing, remembering the flock that passed through my neighborhood last spring, two women burbled up on my right, speaking a European-sounding language that I couldn’t immediately pin down, stopped at the blue jay, and pointed, excited – “Ah, Mordecai! Mordecai!”

I was already holding my phone so I googled – in what language is a blue jay called a “Mordecai”? Google’s AI gently broke it to me that this is not a foreign word for “blue jay” but is in fact the name of an anthropomorphic blue jay on the Cartoon Network animated series Regular Show.

Ah. So, humanity being brought together not really by nature, but by pop culture. One of the women took a picture of Mordecai and a minute later I did, too, because a blue jay is a damn fine bird, wherever you find it.

Photo: Helen Fields, obviously

The Round of Introductions You Didn’t Ask For

By: | July 31, 2026

I’ve been yammering on here at LWON for long enough now that it’s time for readers to get to know me a little more intimately. That means some introductions are in order.

We’ll start strong with my buddy Gus, the Skittle-size hemangioma spooning my liver. As you can imagine, this bundle of excess blood vessels gave me a little scare the first time we met via CT scan, but now we’re pals; I can count on him to be there for the rest of my days.

Next up is Clint, my left-ear dehiscence. He showed up during fetal development, or should I say he missed our scheduled meeting, leaving a gap where parts should have come together. As a result, my left ear forever feels full, it clicks and hisses at me, and sometimes my breathing is disturbingly loud in my own head. I get momentary dizzy spells, too. Patching up Clint would require drilling into my skull beneath my ear, so I’ll be living with this developmental blip for the duration.

Then there’s Betty and the [Bloody] Dozen, my lung node and 12 blood clots that appeared ensemble two years ago, putting me on the fast track to the ER! Betty appears to have tucked in for the long haul—maintaining her girlish figure, thankfully—but the Dozen had to go before they sent me to Stroketown. A little pill that blocks clotting factor Xa did the trick, but I have to keep taking it forever and I’m not allowed to bump my head ever again.

Emmet sits left of center between my eyes, seeming more scar than wrinkle, but I have no memory of an injury there. I’m not sure how he got so deep or why the other one in my “eleven” is much shorter and shallower. Not that symmetry has ever been my thing. I’m unbalanced in lots of ways; just ask my husband. Anyway, Emmet might meet a needle full of Botox someday. We’ll see.

Cybil is the chin scar reminding me of my decades-ago fancy footwork at the ice rink, which ended that one time when I went down harder than usual. A lesson from that day: If you must injure your chin, doing it on ice is super efficient from a first-aid perspective. Regardless, seven stitches led to Cybil’s emergence, and she’s refused to fade away.

Which leads to Finn, my most persistent chin hair—oddly, rooted in Cybil. He enjoys growing to at least an inch before making himself known. I don’t know how he does it.  One day he’s not there and then suddenly, there’s Finn, long as a blade of grass, making a scene. (The one benefit of losing one’s eyesight with age? No more Finn. I may be drawing on my eyebrows with lipstick, but soon Finn will be a distant memory.)

I kindly call my one droopy eye Grace; she’s very self-conscious. Most of the time she’s not that noticeable unless you know to look for her. I probably shouldn’t have mentioned her at all.

Skeeter is my left-eye floater. Irritating as hell, that one. He arrived with great fanfare—flashing lights and dizziness! Now it’s just him, that buggy speck that try as I might I can’t pin down. My swatting him away is fruitless. Doc says there are more to come so settle in.

My cowlick, top left, I call Rinske the temptress. I have nearly mastered the comb-over that keeps her modest, but sometimes she shows a little extra skin and I’m forced to put a clip in her. She hates that.

Omar is the brown mole on the cartilage in my right ear, and Omar requires constant monitoring because he’s extremely ambitious. I tell him I like him just the way he is. Regularly I say to him, “Omar? Don’t go changin.” So far so good.

They don’t have individual names, but periodic white “hotdog spots” mottle my arms and legs. I’m not sure if they’re a fungus or signs of an autoimmune skin condition, but I think of them as bits of gristle in the meat of my extremities and I do admire how they pop against sun-kissed skin.

I have a soft spot for Boris the spider vein.

What to call the cherry angiomas, other than a fabulous band name? You tell me.

I think that’s enough for now, don’t you? The skin tabs (Blimpy, Gilgamesh, and Ray) and the most unflappable of warts (the Hydra) can wait until another day. Also, be ready for Pip, the tiny bead of flesh at the center of my belly button, who is sort of adorable, if I may.

Here’s the thing. In my experience, especially for the bits of ourselves we are least fond of or that threaten to do us harm, giving them names seems to take some of their power away. They’re just the little frenemies our moms made us be nice to because, after all, they’re family. You can’t pick ‘em, so name ‘em and give ‘em some love.

Until next time, may your body, like mine, keep accessorizing, and may your next crusty addition answer to Stimpy McGee.

Photo from Unsplash.

One Damn Thing After Another

By: | July 29, 2026

My mom watering her flowers as a wildfire approaches

I’m helping my mom evacuate, the air getting harder to breathe in this charred perfume, 23 square miles of conifers and oakbrush gone up in flames several miles away. Last report, the fire was about to crest the ridge at 10,000 feet where the front line is being slurried and fought with trenches and hand tools. It’s called the Gold Mountain Fire, started four days ago outside of Ouray, Colorado, from powerlines downed in a windstorm. That wind hasn’t let up. Ash twirls down on us like snow. 

My mom and I carry out furniture she built, heavy oak productions that we load in our two trucks, plus my stepdad’s laptop, a Navajo rug, and a copper bucket containing a box of matches, anything that just can’t be replaced. 

Hold up, I say to the copper bucket and its matches. Why are we taking this?

My mom puzzles the question. She looks exhausted. She says, In case it gets so hot in the house they light.

If it’s that hot, it’s too late. 

I think she’s gotten four hours sleep in the last two nights, and she’s 80, and like feathers of mascara, ashes have landed on her cheeks and shoulders. My stepdad would be here but he had surgery yesterday and is down at their place in town recovering.

Continue reading →