This is a picture of my mother sheltering from an Arctic wind from when this post first published in 2015. She’s nearing 80 now and I just connected with her last night in southern Utah where she’s joining me for a week on the San Juan River. She teeters more than she used to, not as fast on the scramble wearing a pack, and I’m glad to be going back out with her into the wild. With Mother’s Day coming up, I want to honor her tenacity and her hunger for raw experiences.
I held her cold hands in mine, rubbing warmth into them as she crouched behind a rock stack. A wet, July wind was blowing in off the Bering Sea and we’d taken shelter in a hunting blind on a treeless cape of St. Lawrence Island, Alaska. A couple weeks before this trip, I’d asked her if she wanted to come with me to an island 3 degrees below the Arctic circle between the coasts of Siberia and Western Alaska. Without hesitation, she’d said yes. I told her I didn’t know where we were going to stay, landing in a Yup’ik subsistence village with no infrastructure for travelers. She still said yes, not a pause to think about it.
This is what is like to be a traveling writer’s mom, and to be an adventurer’s son.
A scrappy, short animal of a woman, my mom is missing half of two fingers on one hand and a small portion of a third. It was a table saw accident. She used to make a living building furniture, sometimes working too late at night. I rubbed her bony, rough hands just like I did when I was a kid and we’d be on the snowbound side of a mountain in a howling wind, tears welling in her eyes from how cold her fingers would get. Continue reading →
Irradiate maize, and it will begin frantically shuffling its chromosomes. Starve E.coli and it will accelerate its mutation rate. Many organisms have this response to stress. They throw the wildest possibilities at the wall to see what might stick, which is to say, what strange version of themselves might survive. They create disorder that might restore order.
From a chaotic disk of gas, a planet forms and migrates into a stable orbit. Twin moons are brought into resonance. For every turn Enceladus takes around Saturn, Dione takes two. Tidal interactions with the planet keep this ratio steady. Disorder has coalesced into order.
A group of Oxford professors have undertaken to bring these types of phenomena together. In a series of lectures and a book, they explored from fields as diverse as musicology, physics and group theory the symmetry in the universe, especially that between order and disorder. Despite some excitement that they might be approaching a grand theory of everything, the results are loosely connected and, so far, half baked, but it’s the kind of half-baked that reminds you how good cookie dough tastes. It’s what you might imagine goes on at a university until you actually work at one.
Thispost first ran in April 2019. As I get ready to go on maternity leave, I’m struck by how many things, large and small, had to go right for the tentative desires I felt five years ago — for a garden, and maybe even a family — to materialize. It’s been a messy and chaotic period, full of setbacks and delays, wildfires and plagues. But on this day in early May of 2024, I can see rows of lettuce and kale and snapdragons and native wildflowers out my kitchen window, and even a Cecile Bruner climbing rose, as yet uneaten by the deer oraphids. And yes, summer is coming, and with it, a baby. But I’m less afraid of summers (and babies) than I used to be.
Summer is coming. In a few months the foothills surrounding my home will turn blonde, then grey. Streams will dwindle, then peter out. After fire season begins, everything will be covered in ash.
That’s the reality of summer in the Sierra Nevada foothills these days. But right now it’s spring, and what a spring. The mountains are loaded with snow and the rivers are running high. It looks like someone scribbled on the hills with a neon green highlighter. And the flowers, oh the flowers are as good as they get, entire hillsides glazed with golden poppies and shooting stars.
I celebrated the spring bounty last weekend by taking a painting class from an artist named Andie Thrams. Andie’s densely layered watercolors have always felt like home to me, probably because she works not far from the house where I grew up. Her work captures ecological niches in exquisite detail, spanning from the tangled grey pine forests of the Sierra Nevada to the coastal rainforests of Alaska.
For me, Andie’s paintings evoke the smell of pine sap, the feeling of running my fingers along smooth madrone bark and pressing my nose to wet moss. When I lived far away, just looking at Andie’s paintings made me homesick. So when I saw that she was offering a painting workshop, I signed up.
On May Day, my brother and I used to sneak around our neighborhood with our mom, secretly delivering flowers to unsuspecting neighbors. Here are some May Day flowers for you.
In spring 2020, I wasn’t sure how to use Instagram. I mean, I technically knew how to use it. When I logged on, it was honestly keeping me going each day, watching everyone try to figure out what to do at home and seeing that they were just as uncertain as I was. People made sourdough bread, they knitted, they drew rainbows and put them on their windows, they banged pots and pans. But when it came to responding in kind, I wasn’t sure what to do.
Then one of my plants started to grow.
The best way to describe the way I garden is salutary neglect. This phrase, it seems, came from the British loosening their enforcement of trade relations with the colonies in the early 1700s. I have no enforcement whatsoever. I love to buy seed packets and new, hopeful plant starts, and plant them in the garden. I tend them in the first few days, but then something always comes up. (Perhaps not unlike the British—according to the Encyclopedia Britannica, some historians think it would have been impossible for the British to enforce trade across spread-out colonies, others say “a greater cause of salutary neglect was not deliberate but was instead the incompetence, weakness, and self-interest of poorly qualified colonial officials.” Gardening incompetence, weakness and self-interest, that’s me!)
So seeing a thriving plant is always a pleasant surprise. This one started as a low-growing spiky thing, and had stayed that way for a year. In March 2020, it started shooting up toward the sun.
The plant was an echium, a biennial plant which shoots out a flower spike during its second year. These species—there are six of them—are native to the Canary Islands and parts of the west coast of Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. This one, called Echium wildpretti is known for its size—its flower tower can grow up to seven feet.
So I started taking photos of it. And there was much more drama than I thought. In a rainstorm, the spike fell over. A few days later, the tip started to lift skyward again. (Personal drama: I wrote and deleted several penis-themed captions while giggling to myself.) Huge buds grew in a spiral around the spike. Pink flowers appeared, and then an underlayer of purple. The echium toppled over again, and again, it reoriented toward the sun.
This is the kind of drama I would not have noticed otherwise. But in taking photos of E. wildpretti each day, I could see the small changes. I started looking forward to what would happen next, even when there wasn’t much else to look forward to.
Finally, the tower faded. By then we’d fallen into something of a rhythm at home, or at least something that felt less desperate. Elsewhere in the garden, a few small apricots appeared, and then a surfeit of figs. Sunflowers and pumpkins, then the dump of seed pods from the elm that signals the start of fall.
And now it’s spring again. Because of my incompetence and weakness, I could not remember what year I planted the next set of echium starts. Would I have to wait another year to see a bloom? Then about a week ago, an unassuming plant in the shade started growing upward instead of out. Now it is up above my knees, reaching toward the light.
This past weekend, during a tracking course in California (spoiler: I did not ace the final exam), we students were tasked with identifying the above gorgeous creature, found dead by our instructors on — where else? — the highway. This gorgeous little beast is a long-tailed weasel, Neogale frenata, a lithe, furtive carnivore that I’d never before seen in the wild (though I’ve encountered their short-tailed cousins). Beholding this lovely and doomed mustelid, I was reminded, for the billionth time, of how roads both obliterate and reveal wildlife. The long-tailed weasel is an animal seldom glimpsed by humans, and then only as a brief brown flash streaking across the landscape. Cars halt weasels in their tracks, giving us an opportunity to inspect their exquisite bodies — before they decompose and melt into the soil, forever lost.
Last month, scientists described two new species of killer whales, and the community of cetacean researchers and advocates online immediately erupted in the Internet equivalent of excited squeaks, squeals, and whistles.
But I felt a little bereft, my sense of killer whales as cultural beings diminished.
Killer whales – or orcas if you prefer, or blackfish, even though they are not fish at all but, yes, the world’s largest species of dolphin – are a widespread and multifarious bunch, inhabiting all the world’s oceans and staging a grand pageant of different ways of life.
Around the Pacific Northwest, where I live, there are orcas who eat nothing but fish, and Chinook salmon preferentially; orcas who hunt marine mammals like seals, sea lions, and porpoises; and orcas who hunt sharks in deeper offshore waters. Elsewhere in the world, other orcas gather by the hundreds to feast on schools of herring that they herd into tight balls, and still others work in twos or threes to topple seals from Antarctic ice floes.
As a rule, different orca groups scarcely interact and never interbreed, even when they inhabit the same waters. Each group has its own unique dialect of calls and whistles, and many have distinct traditions and even fads: one group of killer whales has recently taken to messing around with yachts; another has long enjoyed rubbing their bodies against the smooth stones of particular beaches; a third, for one memorable summer, wore salmon as hats.
Until now, all these killer whales the world over have been gathered under a single species name: Orcinus orca. So the two new species haven’t been discovered, exactly, in the usual sense of being seen for the first time, or seen for the first time by scientists. Instead they were cogitated – conjured from our increasing knowledge of the whales.
My father, Jim Fields, died unexpectedly in November at age 81, of a stroke. Last week I wrote a eulogy for his memorial service on Saturday. It was hard. I’m a writer, and goldarn it I wanted it to be the best eulogy ever written. (I’m confident that I did not achieve that, but it’s certainly the best eulogy I’ve ever written.) Here‘s a lightly edited version, if you’d like to learn a little about my father.
My dad loved being outside. Hiking was one of his favorite things and it’s actually how my parents met. It was the beginning of the summer of 1961, and it was going to be my mom’s second summer at the YMCA camp in Estes Park, Colorado. She was standing in the Boulder bus station talking to some of the other college kids about hiking—all the hiking she’d done the summer before, all the hiking she was going to do this summer. And there was this guy standing nearby, and listening, and getting closer and closer…
That was my dad. They hiked a lot that summer and then the next summer, and now here we are.
The last time he and I hiked in Rocky Mountain National Park together was in the summer of 2019. He and I walked up Flattop, one of the mountains that they climbed several times in those summers, and kept on going up the next mountain over, Hallett. The picture above is from the top of Hallett.
When we got to the top, he said, and I quote: “Ha-haaa!! Oh, man. Oh boy oh boy oh boy. This is where we get to eat our lunch.” I know that because I took a video. In the video, you can hear me breathing hard from the climb. He was 77 at the time and still in better shape than me. Obviously. My dad was always in better shape than me, until the day he died.
