My father and I spent many of my childhood summers canoeing Ontario’s lake systems, counting moose and camping under the stars. Then I got into my teenage years and he saw my brain go into risk-seeking mode; We switched to whitewater. We paddled Northern rivers in areas where there were so many mosquitoes that, statistically, they could not all land at once. We saw caribou and muskoxen and the sorbet-coloured Smoking Hills. We wrapped our canoe around rocks and paddled to the Arctic Ocean.
So when The Canadian Canoe Museum announced it had opened a grand new facility, that little three-and-a-half hour drive from Ottawa to Peterborough, Ontario wasn’t going to get in our way. It was enough advertising for us to hear that you can walk in the front of the museum and canoe out the back.
This post first appeared in 2016, but I started thinking about it today while I was watching “Young Woman and the Sea,” a Disney movie based on the book by Glenn Stout.In it, Trudy Ederle encounters a bloom of jellyfish while she’s swimming the English Channel–and the filmmakers manage to make the experience look both gorgeous and painful. Swimmers today would likely have to contend with even more stings; the Marine Conservation Society reported a 32% increase in jellyfish in UK waters and on beaches between 2022 and 2023 alone.
*
My kids are really into this cartoon called The Octonauts. It’s about a group of undersea rescuers and researchers (there’s a penguin medic, a sea otter marine biologist, a polar bear captain, among others, plus a group of squeaky-voiced creatures called vegimals.) In one of their (and my) favorite episodes, one of the crew members stays out all night to observe shy garden eels. Others wonder if he’ll be OK all alone out there, but the captain says it looks like it will be a quiet night: “Nothing out there but one little jellyfish. What could go wrong?”
But of course, everything does. When the crew wakes the next morning, sea nettle jellyfish have descended like so many snowflakes, and hijinks ensue.
One October morning in 2013, I walked into the Canmore offices of an organization called the Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, or Y2Y, to speak with its reluctant leader. I was at the outset of my career in journalism, fresh out of graduate school and loose on the land in the Northern Rockies. With my then-girlfriend (now wife), Elise, I was spending two months traveling the length of Y2Y, perhaps the world’s longest wildlife corridor and certainly its most famous. Y2Y was both an abstract concept and an environmental nonprofit, the latter run by a biologist and adventurer named Karsten Heuer, who years earlier had hiked the length of the corridor I was now driving. Heuer was already something of a legend in the conservation world, and I was eager to speak with hm — and, truth be told, a bit cowed to meet a man whose epic journeys on foot made my own exploring feel so shallow and motorized.
ANN:Richard Panek has just published a book called The Pillars of Creation. It’s about the James Webb Space Telescope — which I call JWST and Richard calls Webb, and there’s a story behind that difference but it’s not relevant here — and how it got built and what it’s finding. And Richard, this is SUCH a big subject, the whole multi-year, multi-field enormous expensive telescope. I can imagine ponderous tomes on the politics and construction alone. How did you decide which steps of the JWST’s construction process to include and which to leave out?
RICHARD: First, Ann, I’d like to thank you for inviting me back to LWON. I joined LWON at your invitation all the way back in 2010. For several years I was a regular contributor, and then for a few years I was an irregular contributor—and I leave the punchline to you.
ANN: An irregular contributor? Like, those astronomers who study astronomical transients are transient astronomers? “Irregular” like you’re a little zigzaggy, you slip the leash every now and then?
RICHARD: Kudos for avoiding the constipation interpretation. But I’ve missed coming into the office, and now that I’m here, I have to say I’m glad to see the rolltop desk hasn’t budged and that the red-and-black ribbons in the typewriters are fresh. Some of the inkwells, alas, are dry, but I guess that’s the price of progress.
ANN: You’re quite right about the rolltop and the typewriters — LWON sometimes feels like kind of a throwback. I mean, do people do blogs any more? At LWON, We still Write Whatever The Fuck We Want (WWWTFWW), the motto you first elucidated, Richard–so the dry inkwells I have to take umbrage over. I feel the inkwells are quite wet, juicy even. Now, rather than have this conversation devolve into identities and analogies, shall we just change the subject?
RICHARD: Ah, you asked a question about how I made manageable the scope of Webb’s decades-long lead-up to the launchpad.
Beethoven’s sketches for String Quartet in C sharp minor, op. 131.
We (me, Pete, the baby) have had a wicked mystery cold going for 10 days and counting, and have reached the point where we can’t remember not being sick — have we ever gone anywhere, done anything? Adding to our dismal mood, arborists came to cut down the majestic walnut treethat has provided us with shade and comfort and more birdsongs than I bothered to count — I regret that now — for six years now. Half the tree had diedfrom mysterious causes, leaving the whole dangerously unstable. It all feels too ominously symbolic to dwell on in this week of all weeks, so I am taking comfort where I can find it (including from Kate’s wise post last Friday). One of the things I find comforting is the good people can do when they work together toward a worthy goal, like playing a piece of music or electing a reasonable fucking person to lead the country. Anyway. This post first ran in November 2022.
My grandmother used to take me to master classes at the Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara, where young musicians came from all over the world to train. After buying our $10 tickets, we’d stand in the line of mostly senior citizens waiting for the doors to open. I’d hold her hand and rest my head on her shoulder, inhaling her Obsession perfume.
Nana’s mother didn’t let her listen to music of any kind, growing up, so as an adult she listened constantly to classical music and jazz, taught herself to play cello and taught her children and grandchildren to love music too. We usually sat in the first or second row, close enough to hear the academy students breathing and their shoes squeaking. Barely-out-of-college opera singers wiped their sweaty hands on their pants and pianists dropped their sheet music. Then the teacher would arrive, the students would pull themselves together, and they’d get to work.
These students were very, very good. But as we listened, their instructors made small adjustments that transformed their performances from good to shiver-worthy, perfect.
The maple tree across the street is shivering. Just this morning, she’d stopped my breath with the red-gold flames of her leaves. Now I watch from the kitchen window as brutal gusts shred her gorgeous coat and dash the scraps to the ground.
My eyes stay fixed on the bare tree while my mind cycles through its litany of election dread, terror, and despair. I feel immobilized and powerless against a catastrophic, onrushing future. I feel every violation in history—personal, national, and global—crashing down on me at once.
With great effort, I turn my attention back to the tree. I can be a witness for her, if nothing else.
*
Look for the places where you do have power, my therapist says. Look for ways to do something. Look to your people, and art, and music. Look to the trees.
*
A bright bloom of color sways at the edge of my peripheral vision. I go to the maple tree window again, but this time I tilt my head. More bare branches, more broken limbs, and then—a shimmering, three-story wall of gold. A linden tree, fully leafed, lush and bright and exuberantly alive.
The sight of it lifts my scorched heart and gently turns it over. I want to bathe in that color. I want to know that feeling.
I excavate my only yellow shirt from the bottom of a drawer, tie a yellow bow in my hair, and grab my keys.
The moment I walk out the front door I burst into delighted laughter. The linden is spectacular—and one of so, so many. From my walkway I can see a half-dozen dazzling yellow trees of at least four different species.
I spend the next half-hour greeting every gold tree on my block, marveling at their height, their richness, the way their leaves applaud each other in the wind. Each tree, each leaf, and each yellow is different. Every last one astonishes me.
*
What happened to my maple tree* is real, as is what’s happening in America, and around the world. My life and the lives of so many others—all of us, I would argue—are in grave and legitimate danger. My terror and despair are justified. Unspeakable horrors are unfolding.
Other things are unfolding, too. Things I couldn’t see with my petrified gaze locked in on a single tree. Beautiful things. Joyful things. Tender, mighty things, reaching toward one another.
*Yes, I know thattrees naturally lose their leaves in autumn. Try telling that to my traumatized poet brain. The topmost leaves changing color on the maple tree are also my first indication each year that summer—the worst season for my illness—is ending, so I’m pretty attached.
Today (October 29), I went skiing for the first time this season. Yesterday I drove up to the top of the Mesa to check out conditions, and the ground was completely bare in the sunny spots, with just an inch or less of snow in the shady spots.
What a difference a day makes! When my dog, Leia, and I got up to the Mesa this afternoon, the forecasted six inches of snow had arrived. I just tried to have as much fun as she was having frolicking in the fresh powder.
We’re predicted to get more snow in the next 24 hours, and I’m hopeful that we’ll have enough to do some early season pre-grooming of the trails by Halloween on Thursday. I think of Halloween skiing as a Grand Mesa tradition, but since I’m a data nerd, I decided to look back at the numbers I could piece together to figure out if that’s really the case.
I am not one of those people who use Strava or religiously track kilometers skied or training numbers, but I do have records of the date of my first ski from the last 12 years. I’ve pieced these dates together from my minimal training logs and (mostly) photographs.
2024: October 29 2023: October 13 2022: October 24 2021: October 13 2020: October 27 2019: October 31 2018: October 21 2017: November 18 2016: November 18 2015: October 22 2014: November 14 2013: first ski day unclear, but I have photos of groomed skiing at Skyway on Halloween.
According to these numbers, we’ve had Halloween skiing on nine of the last 12 years. (This assumes we’ll be skiing this Thursday, which seems pretty certain.) Some of these years we’ve had grooming, some years it’s just been backcountry trail-breaking like I did today.
OpenSnow is forecasting 8 inches of snow tomorrow (October 30) so the Halloween skiing should be great! Now I just need to get my costume ready!
