Google saved my life so many times last month, as I trudged through Europe alone. Without Maps, I would never have made it to my meetings, train connections, flights, meals, or anything. Google sent alerts to remind me when to leave; it translated my questions, so I could bleat them in a pathetic form of German to ask for help. I would never have made it if Google hadn’t been there for me. I owe it so much.
This makes me extremely uncomfortable.
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The marmoset looked unlikely on the filing cabinet. It reclined on a piece of poster board, its skinny arms folded across its chest. Its cotton-stuffed eyes stared at the low, tiled ceiling. The specimen room smelled strongly of tea and cornmeal.
Carina pulled the handle of a taller cabinet, and Mo and I leaned in. The three of us—college student, photographer, and writer—had other things we were supposed to be doing. But here, behind the door, there were rows of enticing labeled drawers. Each cabinet, a family—the corvids, the alcids, the procellariids. Each drawer, full of birds. We lifted the owls, the nighthawks, the warblers. We tested their weight. They were light as paper in our hands. I noted the way their feathers layered over one another into soft curves and colors, like summer clouds. The way they gave under the press of fingertips. We moved from family to family, touching clawed feet and folded wings. We exclaimed over this great collection of the dead the way others might coo over kittens. My people, I thought, looking at the other women.
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The path I take in the mornings has a stream, Stony Run, running along one side. The path and the stream are in a tiny wooded floodplain you could throw a rock across. The floodplain and stream are more or less maintained by Baltimore city and by the surrounding community associations – “maintained” as in, a massive re-engineering of the stream and massive clean-ups by the communities twice a year. But between massive efforts the floodplain is left to its own devices and being a floodplain, sometimes it floods. Mostly it just seeps. And after a rain, the path is a muddy patchy swamp. I can’t walk on it until it drains and I am sad.
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My first encounter with the word “hysteresis” was ten years ago when I was editing a particularly difficult electrical engineering feature. That story was one of my favourite I’ve ever worked on, the wild first-person account of the researcher who had unearthed an ancient prediction of a fourth circuit design element, foretold by the laws of mathematical symmetry to augment the holy trinity of electrical circuit design elements: the resistor, the capacitor and the inductor.
What distinguished this fourth mythical element – today known as the “memristor” – from its workaday siblings was its behaviour, which depended more on its history than on any stimulus hitting it at any given moment. This tendency is called hysteresis, and the makers of memristors hope it will make the computers of the future act more human.
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Notre Dame is on fire! one of my oldest friends, Jessica, texted me from New York the morning of April 15th.
I saw. So awful, I typed back.
Then I lost cell service. Pete and I were driving toward Yosemite, taking advantage of his spring break from teaching high school to explore the park. After paying the entrance fee, Pete and I drove through a natural arch formed by two massive boulders, like granite gargoyles touching noses. With the burning spire still flickering in my mind, I turned off my phone.
It was strange to be in Yosemite that day. Feeling tired, Pete and I chose the easiest path in the valley, a paved boulevard that leads straight to the base of Yosemite Falls. We raised our faces to the mist, surrounded by international tourists. A few spoke French, and I wondered what it felt like to be in Yosemite’s so-called natural cathedral while the world’s most beloved human-built cathedral collapsed in flames.
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We camped this past weekend at Big Sur, meeting up with some friends from the north. I made the reservations in November and wasn’t really looking at the calendar, so I didn’t realize that the weekend was a nexus of holidays—Passover, Easter, Earth Day. It felt right, though, being under the trees and in the ocean-tinted air, with the river rushing so fast and close that it sounded like rain.
I woke up earlier than everyone else in the mornings and walked through the campground with the moon setting above the ridge. I remembered when I’d found the campsite, the campground had seemed enormous—hundreds of spaces—and I wondered whether it would feel more like being in the middle of a music festival than camping. But no—the combination of the river and the big trees made the sites feel sheltered, and the air had a hushed feeling, even when our neighbors began playing a drum on the verge of quiet hours.
People talk about Big Sur being special, magical. Does the air have something to do with it? Several companies make perfume and candles that are supposed to recall redwoods and ocean waves, rainwater and eucalyptus. Febreze even makes an air freshener called Big Sur—which has some combination of sandalwood, jasmine, and cherry, according to the description.
The air is what brought Charles David Keeling to this campground, too, in 1955. As a post-doc at Cal Tech, he constructed instruments to measure carbon dioxide in the air, but found that the CO2 concentrations in Pasadena varied. So he took his equipment to a campground in Big Sur, an isolated stretch of the California coast.
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Cameron: Helen! It is I, the high school state debate champion of 2009, here to have another vicious argument with you. Although there are many things about that sentence that are not true, and even grammatically incorrect.
Helen: Oooooh this is exciting. And slightly scary.
Oh spring — a time for renewal. I’m finally (mostly) home from book tour, and I’ve been taking a little break from the grind to breathe in and focus my attention on things that replenish my creative energy and make me feel connected and fully present in my place.
Perhaps the most soul-nourishing thing I’ve done is launch a new podcast with the poet Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, who is also one of my best friends. Emerging Form is a podcast about the creative process, and it’s given my own creative spirit a boost. The podcast is an excuse to stay up late drinking wine and exchanging stories about the creative life with Rosemerry and some interesting guests. It’s a passion project with no external expectations or constraints, and it’s been energizing to create something new that’s just for fun. The podcast feels a lot like this blog — a creative habit that feeds my muse and releases me from feelings of obligation.
I’ve also been spending a lot of time outside. Yesterday I passed some of the afternoon standing underneath one of our apricot trees, just taking in the fragrance of the blossoms and listening to the sound of pollinators buzzing around, doing their jobs. There’s something incredibly comforting about witnessing nature proceeding without human intervention. We’re less important than we believe.
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